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ADOLESCENT GIRLS IN JORDAN: THE STATE OF THE EVIDENCE

* October 2017

DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.22103.52641
Authors:
Elizabeth Presler-Marshall

Ingrid Gercama
* Anthrologica

Nicola Anne Jones
* ODI Global

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Citations (8)
References (53)
Figures (6)

FIGURES

Chores girls versus boys do
…
Schooling and employment status, by age and sex
…
Overview of programme outcomes by type of change
…
School enrolment, by age, sex and camp vs. non-camp location
…
+1
Child marriage in Jordan Child marriages registered in Jordanian shari'a courts
by nationality, 2013
…
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I
Adolescent
girls in
Jordan
The State of the Evidence
Elizabeth Presler-Marshall with Ingrid
Gercama and Nicola Jones
October 2017

Disclaimer
This document is an output of the programme which is
funded by UK Aid from the UK Department for International
Development (DFID). The views expressed and information
contained within are not necessarily those of or endorsed
by DFID, which accepts no responsibility for such views or
information or for any reliance placed on them.

Table of Contents
Executive Summary i
Jordan i
Adolescent girls i
Conclusion and ways forward iii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 The Jordanian context 1
1.2 Jordan’s refugee population 2
1.3 Syrian refugees 2
1.4 Palestine refugees 3
1.5 Iraqi and Yemeni refugees 4
2 Adolescent girls in Jordan 5
2.1 Education 5
2.2 Physical health and nutrition 9
2.3 Bodily integrity 9
2.4 Psychosocial well-being 14
2.5 Voice and agency 17
2.6 Economic empowerment 19
3 Actors for change 21
3.1 Main actors 21
3.2 NGO Partners 25
Conclusions and ways forward 28
References 29

Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
Figures
Figure 1: Sources of earned income for Syrian refugee families 3
Figure 2: Chores girls versus boys do 6
Figure 3: Number of programmes by outcome areas 7
Figure 4: Schooling and employment status, by age and sex 8
Figure 5: Proportion of Syrian marriages involving a child bride, over time 11
Figure 6: Overview of programme outcomes by type of change 14
Figure 7: General problems for displaced Syrian adolescents 16
Figure 8: Girls’ mobility over time 18
Figure 9: How often do family members leave the house? 18
Figure 10: The comprehensive approach of Makanis 22
Tables
Table 1: School enrolment, by age, sex and camp vs. non-camp location 7
Table 2: Child marriage in Jordan 10
Table 3: Reasons girls are optimistic or pessimistic 15
Boxes
Box 1: Syria yesterday, Syria today 1
Box 2: Consanguineous marriage 11
Box 3: A window to the world 16

DfID Department for International Development
DHS Demographic and Health Survey
EER Emergency Education Response
EU European Union
GBV Gender based violence
GII Gender Inequality Index
IMC International Medical Corps
IRC International Rescue Committee
JRP Jordan Response Plan
MENA Middle East and North Africa
NGO Non-governmental Organization
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PISA Programme for International Student Assessment
SIGI Social Institutions and Gender Index
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNFPA United Nations Population Fund
UNHCR United Nations Refugee Agency
UNICEF United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund
UNRWA United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
USAID United States Agency for International Development
WASH Water, Sanitation and Hygiene
WFP World Food Programme
Abbreviations

i
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
Adolescent girls living in Jordan are a diverse population.
While the lives of all are shaped by broader regional culture
– and its highly patriarchal gender norms – as well as the
ongoing Syrian Crisis, in many ways the lives of Jordanian
girls, Palestine refugee girls and Syrian refugee girls are
markedly diﬀerent. This situation analysis attempts to pull
together the thin and fractured evidence base regarding
adolescent girls living in Jordan as both a stand-alone
resource as well as to inform the participatory research
that the GAGE programme is initiating in 2017. Beginning
with a brief overview of the broader Jordanian context,
as well as a short history of the Syrian Crisis, the paper
then turns to an analysis of the existing evidence as to how
adolescents are faring vis-à-vis the capability domains
laid out in the GAGE conceptual framework: education,
physical health and nutrition, bodily integrity, psychosocial
wellbeing, voice and agency and economic empowerment.
Where possible we disaggregate between populations of
girls in our exploration of each of these domains. We then
turn to a discussion of the actors working in Jordan to
improve girls’ outcomes, and the change strategies they
are employing.
Jordan
Sitting at the crossroads of the Middle East and North
Africa, Jordan has long served as a haven for the region’s
refugee population. Beginning with Palestine refugees
in 1948, continuing with Iraqi refugees in the 1990’s, and
since 2011 absorbing hundreds of thousands of Syrians
ﬂeeing both drought and civil war, it is estimated that of
the 9.5 million people living in Jordan, one in three is a
refugee. Of those, just over 2 million are Palestinian and
about 1.5 million are Syrian. While ranked “high” in terms of
human development, Jordan is not a rich country. It has
struggled to absorb those ﬂeeing from civil and regional
wars – physically, economically and socially. Its economic
growth has been nearly ﬂat (or negative) since 2010 and
its real unemployment rate is estimated to be double that
of the oﬃcially reported 14.8%. Jordan’s public schools,
1 http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GII
2 http://www.genderindex.org/country/jordan
which are running double-shift, cannot meet demand and
the country is running out of water.
Jordan long ago granted most Palestine refugees full
citizenship, giving them access to the same rights and
services as other Jordanian citizens. The roughly 20%
who remain living in refugee camps, however, continue to
face high rates of unemployment and poverty. Jordan’s
Syrian population, of which only about half is oﬃcially
registered with the UNHCR, is incredibly fragile. Nearly
90% live below the Jordanian poverty line and, despite
assistance from the UNHCR and UNICEF, at least two-
thirds are food insecure.
Girls and women living in Jordan – regardless of
whether they are Jordanian or are refugees – also face
gender-speciﬁc threats. In 2015, it was 111th (out of 188) on
the Gender Inequality Index1, due to its low rates of female
labour force participation and political representation, and
in 2014 was ranked “high” on the Social Institutions and
Gender Index2, due to the disadvantages that women face
in terms of the family code, civil liberties, and access to
assets and resources.
Adolescent girls
Adolescent girls living in Jordan have disparate experiences
and needs, some of which we know quite a bit about and
others of which remain largely unexplored. While Syrian
refugee girls appear to be the most vulnerable – across
all capability domains – adolescent girls in general face
sharp limits on their voice, choice, and control. In terms of:
Education
• Jordanian adolescent girls are more likely to go to
school than their male peers – 93% complete primary
school and only 10% of secondary-age girls are out of
school (compared to 15% of boys). Furthermore, girls’
scores on the OECD’s PISA are higher than those of
boys. Where Jordanian girls are out of school, social
norms tend to be responsible.
Executive Summary

ii
• Palestine refugee girls are also more likely than their
male peers to be in school, regardless of whether they
live inside or outside of camps. At age 15, for example,
94.7% of girls living outside of camps – compared to
89.5% of boys – are still enrolled in school.
• While Syrian girls, like their Jordanian and Palestinian
peers, are more likely to be enrolled in school than
same-aged boys, their overall odds of school enrolment
are far lower. Only 72% of Syrian girls between the ages
of 9 and 14 – and 29% of girls between the ages of 15
and 17 – are enrolled in school. The primary reason
that Syrian children are out of school is that there are
too few school places available – and families are too
poor to pay for transportation to other schools. For
girls, concerns about violence and “family honour” also
drive non-enrolment.
Physical health and nutrition
• Native born Jordanian girls have a low fertility rate
and health-related research has recently focused
on obesity, which appears to be driven by a growing
penchant for unhealthy Western food.
• There appears to be no research that addresses the
health of Palestine refugee girls – even their fertility
rate is unknown.
• Syrian girls are especially vulnerable. Rates of
adolescent pregnancy are climbing, with 11% of births in
Za’atari camp in 2014 to girls under the age of 18. Syrian
girls are also far more vulnerable to food insecurity.
Bodily integrity
• The rate of child marriage among native born
Jordanians is largely unchanged over the last decade
and was 12.7% in 2013. Most girls who married as
children married men at least ﬁve years older than them
– primarily because their families saw the arrangement
as a form of protection and security for their daughters.
• Palestine refugee girls are more likely to marry as
children – 17.6% of all marriages were to girls under
the age of 18 in 2013. Girls living inside camps are
more likely to marry as children than girls living in host
communities. Palestinian families reported that child
marriage is primarily driven by poverty born of large
families.
• Syrian girls face an ever growing risk of child marriage.
While rates before the war were not low (13% in 2011),
in 2015 nearly one-third of all marriages involving a
Syrian bride involved a girl under the age of 18. While
poverty was initially suspected as a primary driver,
most research has found that child marriages appear
arranged in order to solve one of two closely related
problems: the perceived need to protect girls’ and
families’ honour and improve girls’ security.
There appears to be almost no research directed at
exploring the experiences of adolescent girls with gender-
based violence. While the Jordanian Demographic and
Health results show that GBV is common and accepted,
in terms of adolescents that survey includes only married
girls over the age of 15. Furthermore, although there have
been any number of rapid assessments focused on GBV in
the Syrian refugee community, very little has disaggregated
between girls and women – and there is broad agreement
that girls and women are simply unable to talk about the
subject because doing so could put them at further risk.
Psychosocial wellbeing
• Overall it appears that most Jordanian girls are
optimistic about their own futures and feel well
connected to their families. On the other hand, where
girls struggle with depression and eating disorders they
are unlikely to receive treatment because of stigma
– as parents are concerned about damaging girls’
marriage prospects.
• While we know that Palestine refugee girls in other
contexts are lonely and bored, because of mobility
restrictions, the psychosocial wellbeing of those living
in Jordan does not appear to have been studied.
• Syrian girls’ wellbeing is under continual assault. Not
only have they lost their homes to war – and sometimes
experienced and witnessed horriﬁc violence – but they
are nearly all living in poverty, face increasing hostility
from the Jordanians around them, and have had their
mobility sharply restricted in order to protect them
from real and imagined threats.
While donors and NGOs are working to create girl-friendly
spaces that can provide mobility-restricted girls with
places to go and visit with their friends, there is little known
about the role that Qur’anic centres are already playing in
girls’ lives.
Voice and agency
Gender norms across the MENA region largely preclude’
girls voice and agency – regardless of whether they are

iii
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
Jordanian, Palestinian or Syrian. Girls have far more
limited mobility than boys, especially after puberty, and
are expected to show almost complete obedience to their
parents’ decisions, even when those decisions dictate the
shape of girls’ futures. Syrian girls again appear particularly
disadvantaged, with only a third of adolescent girls even
leaving home on a daily basis.
Economic empowerment
Growing up in a country with one of the lowest rates of
female labour force participation in the world, Jordanian
and Palestine refugee girls are extremely unlikely to be
employed. While in part this is because of girls’ lengthening
engagement with education, research has again found
that the primary barrier girls face is normative. Women in
Jordan are not only not supposed to have careers, they are
not supposed to work. While Syrian boys are all too often
engaged in child labour, Syrian girls are unlikely to work.
The vast majority of Syrian adolescents are neither in work
nor at school and spend their days at home with family.
Actors for change
Primary actors working to improve adolescent girls’ lives in
Jordan include the Jordanian government and an array of
UN and humanitarian agencies (especially UNICEF, UNRWA,
UNFPA, and UN Women) – many of whom are partnering
on the No Lost Generation Initiative. These primary actors
are joined by a large number of international and national
NGOs. While most responses are broadly aimed at Syrian
and Palestinian populations in general (e.g. cash transfers,
food aid, and WASH infrastructure) – and are not especially
girl- or even adolescent-focused – the government’s policy
of allowing Syrian children free access to public education
has been critical to reducing the number of girls who are
out of school (albeit mostly younger adolescent girls).
Similarly, UNICEF’s Makani Centres, which provide a wide
range of services in including both non-formal education
and psychosocial support, are not only helping out-of school
girls keep learning, but giving girls a safe place to meet and
play. UNRWA , UNFPA and UN Women are also running
programmes for adolescent girls. Outside of working to
prevent child marriage, which is a high priority for many
NGOs in Jordan given the rate at which it is now occurring,
few NGO programmes[ appear to target adolescent girls
speciﬁcally. Most are aimed more broadly at children – or
include older girls as a subset of women.
Conclusion and ways forward
In terms of capability domains, the picture of adolescent
girls living in Jordan is relatively clear despite the lack of
focused research. Jordanian and Palestine refugee girls
tend to stay in school longer than their brothers, whereas
despite progress, Syrian girls still face huge obstacles to
accessing education. Jordanian and Palestine refugee
girls are far less likely to marry as children than their
Syrian peers, but child marriage remains common across
populations of girls. Few adolescent girls living in Jordan,
regardless of whether they are Jordanian, Palestine refugee
or Syrian, have access to any sort of decision-making or
economic empowerment, in large part due to the same
social norms that encourage child marriage and also
restrict girls’ mobility, deprive them of friendships, and harm
their psychosocial wellbeing. Gender-based violence is the
one topic that remains relatively opaque. Girls to date have
not been aﬀorded the voice to tell their stories.
It is also clear that there is both interest and funding
to eﬀect change in the lives of adolescent girls living in
Jordan. The number of actors working in the ﬁeld is large
and the number of interventions aimed at girls is growing.
Unfortunately – although understandable given the
humanitarian nature of the context – to date evaluations
have been non-existent.
By supporting girls and their male peers to research
their own lives, GAGE will help them not only develop the
voices they have been largely denied, but also provide
them with a way to use their stories to encourage change.
Even more importantly, however, while we know a great
deal about the threats that girls in Jordan face – and can
identify dozens of actors working to improve their lives –
we do not know what encourages, or prevents, change in
the social norms that shape girls’ daily lives. By providing
us with a grassroots view, adolescent voices will not only
enrichen the evidence base but also help to inform policy
and programmatic action relevant to their lives.

1
Understanding the lives of girls living in Jordan – whether
they be refugees or native Jordanians – requires substantial
contextualisation. It is not only necessary to have some
sense of Jordan’s socio-economic development, and
its history hosting refugees, but also to have some
understanding of the lead up to Syria’s civil war, as that
lead up does much to explain the fragility of Jordan’s Syrian
population (see Box 1). It is also critical to understand
the size and shape of the broader Syrian and Palestine
refugee3 populations.
1.1 The Jordanian context
The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan sits at the crossroads
of the Middle East and North Africa and is bordered by
Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Israel and Palestine. An upper-
middle income constitutional monarchy which gained
its independence from Britain in 1946, Jordan is one of
only two Arab states that have signed a peace treaty with
Israel. Jordan’s population, according to the 2015 census,
is now 9.5 million people – very nearly double what it was a
decade earlier (GoJ, 2016). The country is overwhelmingly
3 This is the preferred term. Palestine refugees are deﬁned as “persons whose
normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June
1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result
of the 1948 conﬂict.”
Sunni Muslim and urban and its economy is largely built on
services and industry.
Jordan is ranked “high” in terms of human development
(UNDP, 2016). While 14.4% of the population lives under the
national poverty line (2010 ﬁgures reported in World Bank,
2017) and its oﬃcial unemployment rate of 14.8% is likely
half that of the actual unemployment rate, it has the best
health care in the region and an educational system that
includes not only 10 years of free basic education, but also
two years of either vocational training or secondary school
(CIA, 2017). Enrolment rates in basic education are over
90% for both girls and boys and 86% of children ultimately
complete their primary education (with a slight bias
towards girls) (GoJ, 2016). Girls, however, are substantially
more likely than boys to enroll in secondary school (65.9%
versus 57.5%) and university (33.7% versus 29.8%)
(GoJ, 2016). Child marriage in Jordan is comparatively
uncommon (7.4%) and the average age at which women
marry is 25.6 years (ibid.). The country’s total fertility rate,
3.4, has left it with a very young population – over 40% of
residents are under the age of 18 (World Bank, 2017).
1 Introduction
Box 1: Syria yesterday, Syria today
The crisis in Syria started well before the 2011 onset of its civil war and has
according to some analysts as much to do with
rain – or the lack thereof – as it does with politics. Syria is a small, arid
country. Less than a quarter of its land is arable and it is
subject, outside of a narrow band of land around the Mediterranean, to extreme
temperature swings and dust storms. Despite
its unfavorable geo-climactic location, Syria a decade ago was a markedly
diﬀerent place than the Syria of today. Not only
was it a haven for Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi refugees, but its population
was overwhelmingly literate and its GDP/capita
was roughly equal to Jordan’s (about $5,000).
In 2006, the rain stopped. By 2010, crop failures had reached 75%, 85% of
livestock had perished, and over 800,000 farmers
had lost their livelihoods. For a country that had been overwhelmingly
agricultural, this was devastating. UN experts estimated
that immediately before the war, some 20-30% of the Syrian population had
already been reduced to extreme poverty and
the World Bank reported that its GDP/capita had fallen over 40% (to $2,900).
Most Syrians went into the civil war already
suﬀering signiﬁcant and overlapping vulnerabilities.
Today’s Syria, which has been declared by the UN to be the worst humanitarian
crisis in the 21st century, is unrecognizable.
In addition to the death toll, which is approaching a half a million, the UNDP
estimates that 45% of its population is displaced,
45.2% of its school aged children are no longer in school, and its GDP loss
since 2011 is over 64%. The country’s current
poverty rate is estimated at 85.2%.
Sources: Polk, 2013; UNDP, 2017

2
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
While girls in Jordan are unlikely to marry as children
and are more likely to pursue higher education than their
brothers and male peers, the country does not rank
highly in terms of gender equality. In 2015, it was 111th (out
of 188) on the Gender Inequality Index4, due to its low
rates of female labour force participation and political
representation, and in 2014 was ranked“high” on the Social
Institutions and Gender Index5, due to the disadvantages
that women face in terms of the family code, civil liberties,
and access to assets and resources.
1.2 Jordan’s refugee
population
Jordan’s location – at the crossroads of the Middle East
and North Africa – has meant that it has long served as
a refuge for those ﬂeeing the region’s perpetual conﬂict.
Indeed, the UNHCR (2016) reports that on a per capita
basis Jordan hosts the second highest number of refugees
in the world (behind Lebanon) and according to data from
the World Bank, refugees now make up 41.2% of Jordan’s
population (World Bank via Jordan Times, 2015). Jordan’s
refugee population is not only large, but varied. While
estimates vary by source, the country is hosting 2.1 million
registered Palestine refugees, 1.4 million Syrians (about half
of whom are registered and half of whom are not), over a
half a million Egyptians, 61,000 Iraqis, 15,000 Lebanese,
5,000 Yemenis, 3,500 Sudanese about 800 Somalis6. In
addition to refugees, there are also about 1.2 million illegal
and 500,000 legal migrant workers in Jordan.
The recent inﬂux of refugees is straining Jordanian
capacity and leading to growing unrest. While most non-
Jordanians are not legally allowed to work (Carrion 2015),
they compete with the poorest Jordanians for informal
jobs – pushing wages down and driving unemployment
up (MoPIC , 2014). Inﬂows have also driven up demand
for housing and other basic commodities, which has
contributed to rising inﬂation that the country’s population
can ill aﬀord, and put tremendous strain on education and
health services – leading to a signiﬁcant drop in quality
(ibid). The Jordanian Government (2014) reports that as a
direct result of the Syrian crisis, an extra 20,000 Jordanian
families have been pushed into poverty so deep that they
require cash assistance. As one of the world’s four most
4 http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GII
5 http://www.genderindex.org/country/jordan
6 UNHCR, 2015; UNHCR, 2016; MoPIC , 2014
7 The Jordan Compact:
https://2c8kkt1ykog81j8k9p47oglb-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Supporting-Syria-the-Region-
London-2016-Jordan-Statement.pdf
water-poor countries, Jordan’s natural resources are also
suﬀering (WFP, 2016).
The 2016 Jordan Compact7 is aimed at mitigating these
strains and reining in unrest. In exchange for increased
international aid, and better access to EU markets, the
Jordanian government has pledged to open up work
opportunities for refugees (3rp 2016; Economist, 2016). The
government’s plans for this aid are laid out in its most recent
Response Plan – which is both multi-sectoral and long-
term. They include an array of improvements designed to
beneﬁt both Jordanian and refugee populations, including
expanding schools and health clinics, distributing solar
panels, providing case management services to survivors of
gender based violence and building parks and playgrounds
(MoPIC, 2016).
1.3 Syrian refugees
UNHCR (2017a) reports that there are 656,231 Syrian
refugees registered with it in Jordan (as of March) –
though government sources estimate that the total Syrian
population is at least twice as large (MOPIC, 2015). While
about 80% of Syrians live in urban and peri-urban host
communities, a sizeable number live in one of the country’s
four oﬃcial camps and about 4% live in tent communities
(Hamad et al., forthcoming). Just under 80,000 live in
Za’atri camp alone – making it one of Jordan’s largest cities
(UNHCR, 2017b). The population of Syrian refugees living
in Jordan is markedly diﬀerent from the pre-war Syrian
population. They are more likely, for example, to have been
farmers – and are thus especially likely to be destitute
because of the drought (Verme et al. 2016). They are also
less likely to be educated, have larger families and are
younger (ibid.). Of registered refugees, UNICEF (2016b)
reports that about half are children and over a third are
school aged.
Before the 2016 Jordan Compact, due to which
the government issued Syrian refugees 200,000 work
permits, only 10% of Syrian refugees were legally allowed
to work (ILO, 2015) – which drove staggeringly high rates
of unemployment and poverty (see Figure 1). Using the
UNHCR cash assistance threshold, which is about $5.25/
per person per day, about 70% of Syrian refugees were
poor in 2016 (Verme et al. 2016). Using the higher Jordanian

3
poverty line (about $8.20/per person/per day), nearly 90%
were poor that same year8 (UNHCR, 2015b; Verme et al.
2016). The UNHCR’s (2015b) Vulnerability Assessment
found that more than 60% of Syrian refugees belong to
households with a ‘severe’ dependency ratio and over 60%
of non-camp families have incurred a ‘high’ or ‘severely
vulnerable’ level of debt per capita. While registering with
the UNHCR does not automatically guarantee refugees to
legal rights or entitlements, on average registered refugees
are 20% less likely to be poor than those who are not
registered (ibid.). UNICEF (2016) reports that as a result
of “running on empty”, families are increasingly forced
to rely on negative coping strategies including reducing
food quantity and quality, cutting accommodation
costs, borrowing and depleting savings and minimising
educational expenses – sometimes by pulling children
out of school (see also UNHCR, 2015b). A 2016 survey, for
example, found that 62% of Syrian households admitted to
eating less food in the last month due to poverty and 54%
to eating poorer quality food (Hamad et al., forthcoming).
There is hope that as a result of the 2016 Jordan
Compact that unemployment and poverty rates will
begin to fall (3rp 2016). However, Verme (2016) observes
that work permits remain extremely diﬃcult to secure,
owing to the requirement of proof that the speciﬁc skill
set is unavailable in Jordanian candidates, and IRIN
8 Figures in 2005 PPP.
9 Only ten of these camps are oﬃcially recognized as refugee camps—because they
were built in response to the 1948 and 1967 crises.
(2017) reported in early 2017 that one year on only 38,516
work permits had actually been issued. Unemployment
among Syrians remains extreme high. A late 2016 survey
by Hamad et al. (forthcoming) found that only 14.2% of
Syrian fathers had paid employment (with only 22.4% of
households having any paid worker).
1.4 Palestine refugees
Although the world’s eyes are focused on Syrian refugees,
Syrians are neither the largest nor the ﬁrst population of
refugees to make their home in Jordan. Indeed, Jordan
has hosted Palestine refugees since the 1948 war and is
now home to the largest number of Palestine refugees of
all UNRWA ﬁelds – some 2.1 million individuals (UNRWA,
2016). Most (1.7 million) live in host communities throughout
Jordan, but about 380,000 live in one of 13 refugees
camps9 run by UNRWA (ibid.).The vast majority of Palestine
refugees have been granted Jordanian citizenship and
have access to the same rights and services as native-born
Jordanians. The population of “double refugees”, however,
which includes about 140,000 ex-Gazans who entered
Jordan after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War as well as nearly
14,000 Palestine refugees who had been living in Syria until
the onset of that country’s civil war, are not citizens and
face a wide variety of restrictions and deprivations. These
double-refugees are nearly invisible in existent research.
Figure 1: Sources of earned income for Syrian refugee families
59%
34%
18%
28%
18%
5% 2%
8%
8%
46%
62%
JUN-15 JUL-15 AUG-15 SEP-15 OCT-15 NOV-15
12%
Father Mother Other member No one
Source: UNICEF, 2016

4
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
Because Jordan’s Palestine refugee population has
been in the country for decades, and is not in ﬂux due
to civil war, there is more accurate information available
about its shape and need. We know, for example, that it
is an especially young population – about one-quarter
of Palestine refugees are children under the age of 15
(512,000) and another ﬁfth are young people between
the ages of 15 and 24 (432,000) (UNRWA 2016). We also
know that despite their refugee status, Palestinian children
are very likely to enrol in school. Primary enrolment is 99%
and by age 15 more than four-ﬁfths of Palestine refugee
children are still students (Tiltnes and Zhang 2013).
However, while girls’ and young women are now at least
as educated as boys and young men10, Palestine refugee
women are signiﬁcantly less likely than their male peers to
join the labour force (60% versus 10%) (ibid.)
Critically in terms of understanding the needs of
Palestine refugees, we also know that there are stark
disparities between those living in host communities
and those living in camps (Tiltnes and Zhang 2013). For
example, the former are more likely to be Jordanian citizens
(96% versus 85%) and less likely to be unemployed (8%
versus 33%) or poor (13.5% versus 31%). from Gaza are
especially likely to be poor, they are three time more likely
than non-Gazans to be living on less than $1.25/day. Camp
dwellers have larger households (5.1 versus 4.7), due both
to higher odds of living in a three generation household
and higher fertility, and are more likely to report ill-health.
Indeed, while on most indicators Palestine refugees living
outside of camps are increasingly indistinguishable from
their Jordanian hosts, those living in camps – who were
the least educated and the most destitute and vulnerable
upon their arrival decades ago – appear to be falling further
and further behind (ibid.).
The Syrian crisis has had a number of serious
ramiﬁcations for Palestine refugees – especially those
living in camps, who largely depend on UNWRA assistance
and increasingly see themselves as the “forgotten people”
(Jones et al., 2016). Not only has international attention
turned to their Syrian counterparts, but UNRWA budgets
have been slashed to accommodate the region’s
greater need – even as costs for daily necessities have
10 For those under the age of 25, females are signiﬁcantly more likely than
males to have completed primary school.
skyrocketed. As a participant in a recent evaluation of
UNWRA’s cash transfer noted, ‘the Syrian card [the e-card
provided by UNHCR / UNICEF] can buy much more than
the UNRWA card’ (quoted in ibid).
1.5 Iraqi and Yemeni refugees
While there have been Iraqi refugees in Jordan since the
1991 Gulf War, with a signiﬁcant increase following the 2003
US-led invasion of Iraq, the ascendancy of the Islamic
State has forced tens of thousands of Iraqis – especially
Christians – into Jordan since late 2013. UNHCR (2017a)
estimates that about one-third of the roughly 62,000
registered refugees are children under the age of 18. Like
their Syrian counterparts, Iraqi refugees have access to
Jordanian public services, including schools and health
care. Unlike their Syrian counterparts, however, they are
not automatically granted refugee status and they do not
have camps or earmarked aid (Su, 2014).They also remain
completely excluded from legal work. As a result, while
many of those ﬂeeing Iraqi violence were middle class
and signiﬁcantly better oﬀ than Syrian refugees, which
kept many from even registering with the UNHCR, over
time their resources have been exhausted and they are
being forced to turn to negative coping strategies given
the paucity of aid available to non-Syrians (IRIN, 2013).
Jordan’s Yemeni refugees are also largely invisible on
the international scene. Arriving in the country en masse
since 2015, when the conﬂict in Yemen escalated, these
are now – according to the UNHCR (2016) about 5,000
Yemeni refugees in Jordan. Government ﬁgures are much
higher, with ARDD (2016) reporting that based on oﬃcial
ﬁgures there may be at least 15,000 Yemini refugees in
the country. They also note, however, that all ﬁgures are
questionable. The Jordanian government, trying to prevent
another humanitarian crisis, has required that Yemenis
have a visa in order to enter the country since December
2015, and thus there is considerable incentive on the part
of Yemenis to remain invisible. The lack of oﬃcial residency
means that Yemeni children have no access to education
– and young Yemeni mothers are unable to register their
children’s births.

5
It is clear that adolescent girls in Jordan – whether they
are Jordanian, Syrian, or Palestine refugees – face a wide
variety of threats that work to prevent them from realising
their capabilities. It is also clear, however, that our overall
knowledge base about adolescent girls in speciﬁc and
adolescents in general remains comparatively small and
fragmented. While we know quite a bit about Palestine
refugee girls’ access to employment, the rising risk that
Syrian girls face in terms of child marriage (which is
mirrored by boys‘growing participation in child labour), and
the rising incidence of eating disorders amongst Jordanian
girls, no one population of girls is well understood and
no one capability domain – outside of education – well
explored. Below we lay out what is known, taking care to
disaggregate between populations of girls where possible,
and contextualising with the experiences of boys and
young women where necessary.
2.1 Education
Jordan’s educational system, which serves – for free
– Jordanian, most Syrian and most Palestine refugee
children, has been overwhelmed by the influx of new
students (Culbertson et al., 2016; USAID, 2015). There
are significant pressures on school spaces, teachers
and teaching materials. Schools are running on double
shifts and retired and newly graduated teachers have
been brought in as a way to expand capacity. This has
not, however, been enough. There are over 170,00011
children in Jordan who are out of school and those who
are enrolled are facing crowded conditions and insuﬃcient
teaching time and experiencing declines in educational
quality so large that they can be tracked on international
metrics such as the Programme for International Student
Assessment (PISA)12 (Culbertson et al., 2016; USAID, 2015).
Adolescents in USAID’s (2015) National Youth Assessment
also report high rates of teacher absenteeism and turnover
and rampant physical and verbal abuse at the hands of
11 Of those children, roughly half are Jordanian and Palestinian children of
basic school age (see: http://www.oosci-mena.org/uploads/1/wysiwyg/
summary/150114_Jordan_summary_English_Preview.pdf) and roughly half are Syrian
refugees.
12 The PISA is a worldwide study undertaken by the OECD to test 15 year old
students’ performance on science, math and reading. In 2006 it was
given to 400,000 students in 57 countries.
13 About 80% of the girls in the survey were Syrian refugees and about 20% were
Jordanian nationals.
teachers. Despite the educational challenges facing
Jordan, schooling is very important to adolescent girls.
Of those in the IRC’s 2015 Adolescent Girls Assessment13,
nearly a quarter said that going to school was their favourite
activity, as it not only helped them obtain an education, but
also provided a venue for interacting with their friends.
The last few years notwithstanding, the last four
decades have seen a sea-change in terms of educational
opportunities for Jordanian girls, who see schooling as a
“weapon” with which to protect themselves (USAID, 2015).
Driven by a primary enrolment rate that is now 98% – and
a primary completion rate that is 93% (EPDC, 2014) –
Jordanian girls between the ages of 15 and 24 have seen
their literacy rates climb from only 55% in 1980 to 99% in
2010 (World Bank, 2013). Indeed, only 10% of secondary-
aged adolescent girls are out of school, compared to 15%
for boys (EPDC, 2014), and young Jordanian women are
more likely to enrol in university than are their male peers
(World Bank, 2013).
Interestingly, despite the fact that over half the
Jordanian women in a recent survey reported that
education was important for girls “mostly to become good
wives and mothers and not to get a good job” (World Bank,
2013:54; see also USAID, 2015), Jordanian adolescent
girls are strong academic performers who do not shy
away from doing well even in traditionally ‘male’ subjects.
Using scores from the 2006 PISA , Jordanian 15 year old
girls were amongst the few in the world who did not test
poorly in math and science compared to their male peers
(Shaﬁq, 2013). Indeed, on the 2012 PISA, while Jordanian
girls signiﬁcantly underperformed on all three subtests
compared to the OECD mean, they tested far higher than
their male counterparts. On reading they scored 436
(compared to 361 for boys), on math they scored 396
(compared to 375 for boys) and on science they scored
430 (compared to 388 for boys)(USAID, 2014).
2 Adolescent girls in Jordan

6
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
For Jordanian girls who continue to be denied an
education, social norms regarding girls’ work and purity
overwhelmingly drive school leaving. The King Hussein
Foundation (2016) found, in its study of homebound girls,
that girls’ number one reported reason for school leaving
was “my mother needs me at home”. Girls’ number two
reason was “my parents encouraged me to leave”. Mothers,
on the other hand, were more speciﬁc. They focused on the
cost and insecurity of transportation to secondary school,
there being no need to educate “girls who are not clever”,
and their beliefs that once girls have feminine bodies school
is not an appropriate place for them to be. The Foundation
also found that Jordanian girls are far more likely than boys
to be assigned household chores (see Figure 2).
Palestine refugee girls living in Jordan have seen similar
improvements in their educational access and outcomes.
While girls living outside of camps – who most often attend
Jordanian public schools – have higher enrolment rates
than those living inside camps –who mostly attend UNWRA
schools (98% versus 94.6%), girls’ enrolment rates in both
environments are higher than those of boys (96.8% and
94.2% respectively)(Tiltnes and Zhang 2013)(see Table 1).
By age 15, both types of disparities have grown. For girls,
94.7% of those outside of camps and 82.1% of those inside
camps are still enrolled. For boys, the ﬁgures are 89.5% and
80% respectively (ibid.). While girls are more likely than
boys to pursue secondary and tertiary education, boys are
more likely than girls to undertake vocational training. For
those outside of camps, 13% of boys and only 6% of girls
enrol in a vocational programme (16% versus 9% for those
in camps). Furthermore, subject choices remain highly
gendered. Boys tend to study construction and mechanics
while girls elect personal grooming and nursing (ibid.).
While in the past it was relatively more common for
Palestine refugee girls to be denied an education simply
because parents did not believe in girls’ education, surveys
ﬁnd this is not primarily the case today. Of women over the
age of 15, 8% of those living in camps and 7% of those living
outside of camps left school because “girls are not allowed
schooling”. Of girls and young women aged 6 to 24, however,
1% of those inside of camps and 5% of those outside of
camps had left for that reason (Tiltnes and Zhang, 2013).
While Jordan is doing signiﬁcantly better in terms of
enrolling Syrian refugees than other host countries, with
about two-thirds of school aged children attending school
(compared to 20% in Lebanon and 30% in Turkey), tens
of thousands of Syrian girls remain out of school in Jordan
(Sirin and Sirin-Rogers, 2015). Given that before the war
primary school in Syria was nearly universal and 70% of
adolescent girls enrolled in secondary school (UNDP,
2011), this represents a remarkable drop in just a handful
of years. Unsurprisingly, since the refugee population is in
42.4 41.2
29.8
9.8
31.4
26.4
7.8
32.2
5.543.6
17.2
20.3
26.9
22.7
5.5
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
Cleaning the
house
Washing
dishes
Cooking & food
preparation
Buying
groceries
Teaching
siblings
Cleaning the
outside of
the house
Household
maintenance
Laundry
and ironing
Female children (% households) Male children (% households)
Figure 2: Chores girls versus boys do
Source: King Hussein Foundation, 2016

7
constant ﬂux, estimates of the number of children out of
school vary – ranging from a low of 80,000 (HRW, 2016)
to a high of 97,000 (Culbertson et al., 2016) – though
sources agree that most out of school children are
engaged in some sort of informal education (HRW, 2016;
UNICEF, 2015). DfID (2016) reports that as of March 2016
the Jordanian MoE estimates just under 85,000 children
are out of formal school and that 32,000 lack access to
even informal education. Similar to their Palestinian peers,
Syrian boys are more likely to be out of school than girls
– often because they are working, adolescents are less
likely to be enrolled than younger children and children
living in Za’atari camp are less likely to go to school than
children living in host communities (see Figures 3 and 4).
Table 1: School enrolment, by age, sex and camp vs. non-camp location
Age Outside Camps Inside Camps
Boys Girls Total Boys Girls Total
697.1 96.3 96.7 95.9 96.7 96.3
799.0 99.7 99.3 99.1 98.5 98.8
8100.0 98.9 99.5 98.7 98.9 98.8
9100.0 99.6 99.8 98.5 98.7 98.6
10 98.3 100.0 99.2 98.1 98.3 98.2
11 98.1 99.4 98.9 97.1 97.2 97.2
12 97.8 100.0 98.9 95.4 95.9 95.6
13 96.8 95.7 96.2 92.4 92.0 92.2
14 93.0 95.7 94.2 8 6.7 88.0 87.3
15 89.5 94.7 91.9 80. 0 82.1 81.0
All 6-15 96.8 98.0 97.4 94.2 94.6 94.4
n 1,840 1,800 3,640 25,028 23,948 48,976
Source: Tiltnes and Zhang 2013
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
Female: 6 to 11 Male: 6 to 11 Female: 12 to 17 Male: 12 to 17
Host
communities
Zaatari
Camp
Enrolment
Girls and boys by age
Source: Culbertson, 2015
Figure 3: Number of programmes by outcome areas

8
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
Interestingly, children living in female headed households
are signiﬁcantly more likely to be attending school than
those living in male headed households (70.4% versus 61%)
– with eﬀects especially large for adolescent boys (57.5%
versus 44.7%)(UNICEF, 2015).
Culbertson et al. (2016) found that there were four
primary reasons that Syrian children were not attending
school, two more procedural and two more practical. In
terms of policy, some 65,000 children are barred from
formal education because they have been out of school for
more than three years14 – most because so many schools
in Syria have closed due to the war. Additionally, Jordan
has no mechanism for mid-year registration, meaning that
all recently arrived children must wait until the following
year in order to enrol. In terms of practicalities, despite the
fact that the Jordanian government provides free public
education to Syrian students, there are simply not places
for all the children who would like to attend school, even
with double shifts. Nearly 40% of respondents in one recent
survey said that their children were out of school because
there were no places for them (38%)--another 20% said
that school was too far and a further 33% could not aﬀord
the transport that would allow their children to access
school (Hamad et al., forthcoming). Furthermore, where
schools do have space for new students, they are likely
to be located in places where potential students are not,
meaning that transportation issues prevent enrolment, or
to only be available in the second-shift – which is especially
14 DfID reports that the Government of Jordan declared an end to this policy
after the Jordan Compact
problematic for girls, given the mobility restrictions they
face in the evenings (see also Hamad et al., forthcoming).
Other research has pointed to other educational
barriers. For example, the IRC (2015), Sirin and Sirin-Rogers
(2015), USAID (2015) and the WRC (2014) found that Syrian
parents kept their children out of school because they were
worried about their children’s safety in the face of growing
bullying – including sexual harassment in the case of girls,
recognised that teachers were not prepared to teach
highly traumatised children or were intimidated by the fact
that their children would not be allowed to have Syrian
teachers. Dean (2015) and Hamad et al. (forthcoming),
on the other hand, found that Syrian children sometimes
see no point in education, given their limited employment
prospects. In Hamad et al.’s (forthcoming ) survey, 21% were
out of school because of “lack of motivation” and 13% were
out of school for ill health or disability.
A recent survey highlighted a common thread: poverty.
One third of respondents in UNICEF’s (2016) most recent
work identiﬁed lack of money as a key reason for children’s
non-enrolment – with 14% saying that their children were
working to support the family. These ﬁgures are echoed
in Hamad et al.’s (forthcoming) research, which found
that transportation costs were unsurmountable to 33%
of Syrian children and that 8% of children spent their
days working rather than studying. The top reason that
adolescent girls living in the Jena host community gave for
being out of school was that they did not have money for
Figure 4: Schooling and employment status, by age and sex
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
Female (9-14 years) Female (15-17 years) Male (9-14 years) Male (15-17 years)
Employment
only
Neither
Enrolment
Schooling
only
0%
28%
72% 70%
1%
29%
3%
34%
63%
12%
64%
22%
Source: Culbertson, 2015

9
uniforms, shoes and books (Culbertson et al. , 2016) – the
ﬁrst of which was particularly important to girls in the IRC’s
(2015) study given that girls are supposed to look “elegant”.
Despite the fact that most Syrians agree that Jordanian
schools are providing a decent education, with only 9%
of those in host communities and 20% of those in Za’atari
describing school quality as “bad”, even Syrian adolescents
who stay in school rarely see good educational outcomes
(Culbertson et al., 2016; IRC, 2015; Sirin and Sirin-Rogers,
2015). At the end of 12th grade students in Jordanian
schools sit the Tawjihi exam – which determines whether
or not they are eligible to attend university. That exam,
which is considered ﬂawed by many researchers because
it does not take account of the reality that urban students’
education tends to be superior than that of rural students’,
is proving a particular stumbling block for Syrian refugees
(Culberton, 2015; Brown et al., 2014). Only 2% of students
living in Za’atari camp passed the exam – compared to
40% native born Jordanians (Culbertson et al., 2016).
Critical to understanding the educational trajectories
of all groups of girls is the reality that girls themselves have
little say over how long they will be allowed to study. While
most girls in USAID’s (2015) Youth Assessment reported
that as long as they were doing well in school they would be
allowed to continue, they also made it clear that “decisions
to remove females from school are generally made by
parents who are more preoccupied with family honour
which is linked to their daughters’ reputations” (p.5). While
Syrian boys are regularly pressured by their parents to
leave school in order to work, because the government has
tended to turn a blind eye towards their illegal employment,
boys overall have more input in the decision that impact
their schooling (ibid.).
2.2 Physical health and
nutrition
Like its educational system, Jordan’s health system has
been strained by the recent influx of refugees. While
Jordan prides itself on its health care, and provides free
primary health services – including maternal and child
health, immunisations and school health services – wait
times have grown in recent years and quality has dropped
(UNICEF, 2016). Participants in a recent assessment of
UNHCR’s cash transfer programme reported that many
refugees now opt for private care even if it is a signiﬁcant
cost (Hamad et al., forthcoming). That said, the 2012 DHS
found that maternity care is nearly universal.
There has been little research directed at the physical
health and nutrition of adolescent girls living in Jordan.
In large part this appears to be because Jordanian and
Palestine refugee girls are generally well fed and healthy
and do not face high rates of adolescent pregnancy. Neither
can be said of Syrian girls.
For native born Jordanians, who have a low adolescent
fertility rate (2.3%)(World Bank, 2017) despite adolescents’
low rate of contraceptive use (26.1% for girls 15-19 versus
45.4% for women 20-24)(GoJ and ICF International,
2013), recent research has almost exclusively focused on
eating disorders – which while having physical outcomes,
will be discussed below under the rubric of psychosocial
capabilities. From a more physical perspective, obesity
is a growing concern in Jordan. Not only are nearly 70%
of all Jordanians overweight (Mokdad et al., 2014), but
adolescents have a growing penchant for consuming
unhealthy foods such as soft drinks and sweets (Haddad
et al. 2009) and girls in particular face cultural constraints
against physical activity. Climbing rates of obesity are
especially concerning given the country’s high rate of
smoking. A 2010 survey found that one-ﬁfth of girls between
the ages of 13 and 15 smoke (compared to over one-third of
boys)(WHO 2010 as cited in Youthpolicy.org, 2014).
The sole study that touches on the physical health of
Jordan’s Palestinian population merely observed that girls
between the ages of 15 and 19 were in good health – with no
real diﬀerences between those living in and out of camps
(Tiltnes and Zhang 2013). That survey did not include
the adolescent fertility rate for either population of girls
(though girls in camps are more likely to marry as children,
discussed below).
Syrian girls’ physical health appears more at risk – with
rates of adolescent pregnancy climbing in tandem with
rate of child marriage (see below). Shabani et al. (2016)
report that while 5% of deliveries in Za’atari camp in the ﬁrst
quarter of 2013 were to girls under the age of 18, by 2014
the rate had reached 8.5%. Samari (2015) notes the same
upward trend, but reports the 2014 rate at 11%.
2.3 Bodily integrity
In Jordan, threats to adolescent girls’ bodily integrity
revolve around child marriage and gender-based violence.
Syrian girls are particularly vulnerable to the ﬁrst. The
second, however, is almost completely unexplored –
meaning that we have no idea how many girls experience
violence, by whom, where and what sorts of violence are
most common.

10
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
2.3.1 Child marriage
As noted by Al Gharaibeh (2016), the importance of marriage
to those living in the Arab world cannot be overstated. It
is not only “central to obtaining social acceptance and
self-actualisation of the socio-religious adult role for the
individual”, but is a contract between families and across
generations (p. 14). Because marriage is so important to
Jordanian social fabric, the law does not prevent child
marriage. On the one hand, the minimum age for marriage, for
both women and men, is 18. On the other hand, girls between
the ages of 15 and 18 can be married if given permission
from a Sharia Court (World Bank, 2013). This legal “loophole”
appears responsible for Jordan’s lack of progress on child
marriage, which UNICEF (2014) found nearly stable rates
between 2005 (at 14.3%) and 2013 (at 13.2%) (see Table 2)15.
UNICEF (2014) observes that while poverty and education
are clearly related to child marriage in Jordan, statistical
relationships appear complicated and non-linear. Girls in
better oﬀ governorates are sometimes more at risk of child
marriage than those from poorer governorates and school
enrolment itself sometimes less protective than academic
success. That said, nearly all married girls had already left
school before their marriage and very few married girls had
access to continued education.
Most respondents in UNICEF’s qualitative follow-up
study felt that child marriage was not ideal. However, they
also agreed that in “compelling” circumstances, it could be
the best for both girls and their families. Circumstances
considered “compelling” included adolescent pregnancy,
15 Data on child marriage in Jordan has some notable inconsistencies. UNICEF’s
2014 study on child marriage in Jordan found rates signiﬁcantly
higher than the 2012 DHS—which found that of women aged 20-24, 8.4% had been
married by the age of 18 and also found that rates had declined
signiﬁcantly across cohorts. UNICEF’s international website
(https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-protection/child-marriage/) reports a rate
of 8%
(rounding from the 2012 ﬁgure). In 2016, UNICEF reported that the 2015 Jordan
Population and Housing Census found the child marriage rate for
girls to be 7.4%
(https://www.unicef.org/jordan/New-Graphs-LAST-UPDATE_Pro15Mar2016_-1A3.pdf).
an abusive home environment and situations in which girls
were living with extended family (ibid.). Respondents also
agreed that even where female relatives were instrumental
in arranging and encouraging girls to marry as children,
the ultimate decision was made by girls’ fathers (or male
guardians), who have legal authority over their daughters
until they are married – at which time that authority is
assumed by their husbands.
Disaggregating populations of girls, 12.7% of marriages
registered to Jordanian nationals in 2013 involved a bride
under the age of 18 (UNICEF, 2014) – with child brides
especially likely to marry relatives (GoJ and ICF International,
2013)(see Box 2). About 20% of these Jordanian girls
married a man less than ﬁve years their elder. Nearly half
married a man between ﬁve and ten years their elder and
over a quarter married a man more than ten years their elder
(UNICEF, 2014). Jordanian respondents in UNICEF’s study
(2014) focused largely on marriage as a form of protection
and security for girls, especially for girls already out of
school. Some parents also mentioned a fear of the media
and technology as a reason for marrying their daughters
as children. They were afraid that their daughters might
be exposed to bad habits as they progressed through
adolescence and believed that early marriage might ensure
better marital prospects. A handful also mentioned that
they did not believe that school adequately protected their
daughters – leading them to take their daughters out of
school and thus raise their odds of child marriage. Girls in
USAID’s (2015) National Youth Assessment reported that
Table 2: Child marriage in Jordan
Child marriages registered in Jordanian shari’a courts by nationality, 2013
Nationality Marriages at age 15-17 All registered marriage Marriages age 15-17
as % of all marriages
Jordanian 8 402 66 184 12.7%
Palestinian 382 2 173 17.6 %
Syrian 735 2 936 25.0%
Iraqi 19 471 4.0%
Other 80 1 096 7.3%
Average 13.2%
Source: UNICEF, 2014.

11
girls who were not doing well in school were the most likely
to be removed from school and forced into marriage.
Palestine refugee girls living in Jordan are more likely
to marry as children than their Jordanian peers. UNICEF’s
(2014) study found that in 2013, 17.6% of marriages to
Palestine refugees involved girls under the age of 18.
Disaggregating between camp and non-camp population,
Tiltnes and Zhang (2013) found that 12% of girls aged 15-19
living inside of camps – and 6% of their peers living outside
of camps – were already married. Palestine refugee girls,
like their Jordanian counterparts, are quite likely to marry
men substantially older than they are. Over half of girls
married men between ﬁve and ten years their elder and
over a quarter married men more than ten years older than
themselves (UNICEF, 2014). In terms of drivers, Palestinian
respondents focused on household poverty, largely born
of large family size, as a key reason that girls married as
children. On a related note, UNRWA (2016c) reports that
while forced marriage is uncommon among Palestine
refugees who have been living in Jordan for years, among
those who have recently arrived from Syria it is quite
common – 20%.
Syrian girls living in Jordan are at the highest risk of
child marriage. UNICEF’s (2014) analysis found that in 2013,
a full-quarter of all marriages involving Syrians involved a
girl under the age of 18 – and by 2014 that proportion had
risen to 32% (UNICEF, 2016). It also found that Syrian girls
are the most likely to marry older men. Over 37% of child
marriages involved a groom ﬁve to ten years older than the
bride. Nearly 32% involved a groom ten to fourteen years
older and over 16% involved a groom more than ﬁfteen
years older. While Syrian respondents, like their Jordanian
and Palestinian counterparts, most often mentioned
marriage as a form of security for girls, especially in the
context of growing poverty, they also focused on other
drivers. For example, some saw child marriage as a way
to reduce the odds of rape and others reported that girls
had married in order gain Jordanian citizenship (where
they had married nationals) or permission to live outside
of Za’atari camp. Still others explained that child marriage
had been used to improve men’s access to Jordan (where
they believed that married male refugees were more likely
to be admitted to Jordan than those who were not married)
or to secure better ﬁnancial prospects for their families
(especially where they were brokered to men from Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf States).
Although child marriage was not unheard of in Syria
before the war, with 3% of girls married before the age of
15 and 13% married before the age of 18, it has become
markedly more common as the war drags on (UNICEF,
2016) – perhaps especially for girls from urban areas, for
whom child marriage had become relatively rare (WRC,
2016) (see Figure 5). Syrian refugee girls are not only twice
as likely to marry as children now than they were just a
few years ago, but the shape of their marriages is also
shifting. UN Women (2013) and the WRC (2014) report
that child brides used to marry boys and young men just a
few years older, which they no longer do. It also reports that
temporary marriages are becoming more common, with
one-in-ten respondents knowing of at least one temporary
marriage, despite Jordanian clerics’ attempts to stamp
them out by issuing fatwas.
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35%
2014
2013
2012
2011
Box 2: Consanguineous marriage
It is common in Jordan for girls and women to marry their
cousins. This not only has ramiﬁcations for the bride, as
it speaks to an arranged marriage, but also has knock-on
implications for the future, as consanguineous marriages
are more likely to result in children with disabilities that
require more care—and face uncertain futures.
The youngest Jordanian brides are the most likely to
marry relatives, because they are the most likely to have
arranged marriage. According to the 2012 DHS, 43% of
married 15-19 year old girls are related to their husbands.
This is markedly diﬀerent from older women. For women
aged 20-24, only 30% are related to their husbands.
Figure 5: Proportion of Syrian marriages
involving a child bride, over time
Source: UNICEF, 2016

12
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
There has been much research aimed at identifying
the factors pushing Syrian girls into marriage (WRC, 2016,
CARE, 2015; IRC, 2015; UNICEF, 2013; Save the Children,
2014, UN Women, 2013). While poverty was initially
suspected as a primary driver, with some authors even
reporting fathers choosing to marry their daughters in
order to collect dowry, most research has found that child
marriages appear arranged in order to solve one of two
closely related problems: protect girls’ and families’ honour
and improve girls’ security. First, war and displacement
have left girls highly vulnerable to stigma as they have
had to enter and endure mixed-sex settings that have
caused their neighbours to gossip and their parents to
become fearful for their reputations (WRC, 2016; IRC, 2015;
USAID, 2015). As a result, CARE (2015) found that “child
marriage was seen as a form of ‘protection’ and a way for
families to keep the ‘honour’ of their daughters” (p. 7) , with
married girls not only seen as less vulnerable to rape, but
also less stigmatised in the event that they were raped
(WRC, 2016). Save the Children (2014), however, notes
that honour all too often has little to do with girls and much
to do with families. They observe that in Syrian culture a
girl’s “value is largely determined by her upholding family
honour, producing children and remaining within the home”
(p. 5), meaning that families’ claims that child marriage
protects girls is more about protecting an asset than it is
about protecting a child. Indeed, CARE’s (2015) research
also found that older adolescent girls reported that their
parents were distant and emotionally abusive as they
began to obsess about “so-called ‘honour’” and push their
daughters into accepting a marriage and USAID (2015)
found that brothers and even older married sisters bully
unmarried girls in order to reinforce their lowly position in
the family.
That said, what is important to recognize from a
programming perspective, is given that marriage is the
most signiﬁcant form of protection available for Syrian
women, parents’ logic that it can oﬀer their daughters
ﬁnancial and physical security is culturally sound – albeit
often empirically inaccurate (Charles and Denman, 2013).
UN Women (2013) notes that this is particularly the case for
girls whose marriages are not reviewed by Sharia courts,
either because their parents cannot aﬀord the cost or do
not understand the rules. Those girls, and their children,
have little access to any form of legal protection (see also
WRC, 2014).
2.3.2 Gender-based violence
Gender-based violence is both common and accepted in
Jordan. The 2012 Demographic and Health Survey found
that about a third of women had been subjected to at least
one form of violence at least once since the age of 15 and
that about a ﬁfth had been subjected to violence at the
hands of their husband (Government of Jordan and ICF
International, 2013). Furthermore, 70% of ever-married
women agreed that husbands had the right to perpetrate
violence on their wives for at least one reason (ibid.).
As noted above in the discussion about Jordan’s poor
performance on gender indices, national law eﬀectively
supports men’s dominance over women (Grandlund, 2014).
Not only are all unmarried women under the age of 30
legally required to have a male guardian, for example, but
under the Penal Code charges of rape can be dropped if
the perpetrator marries the victim for at least ﬁve years
(Grandlund, 2014; Ismayilova et al. 2013). Indeed, Husseini
(2016) reports that claims of violence against women are
so denigrated within the justice system that only 3% of
survivors of gender-based violence reported that they
would seek help from the police. Likely reﬂecting the deep
importance attached to notions of honour, women with the
most education and from the best-oﬀ families were the
least likely to report (World Bank, 2013).
Adolescent girls in Jordan are even more likely than
adult women to experience violence and to believe that
it is justified. The 2012 DHS, which does not allow us
to distinguish between populations of Jordanian and
Palestine refugee girls, found that while 70% of all ever-
married women believed that wife beating could be
justiﬁed, 85% of ever married girls between the ages of 15
and 19 believed that it could be (Government of Jordan
and ICF International, 2013). Furthermore, while 6% of all
ever-married women had experienced sexual violence
at the hands of their husbands in the last year, 12.9%
of adolescent girls had been victimised. The youngest
adolescents are especially vulnerable. Married girls
between the ages of 15 and 17 were signiﬁcantly more likely
to experience physical violence than were girls who were
18 or 19 (30.2% versus 23%). Adolescent girls are also less
likely to seek help for violence. While 40.7% of all women
who admitted to having experienced violence also said
that they had sought help, only 33.1% of girls reported that
they had done so.
The only study that focuses on Jordanian nationals
and appears aimed at the nexus of gender-based violence

13
and adolescence addresses honour killings (Eisner et al..
2013). While absolute numbers are low16, honour killings
account for a “substantial portion of all known homicides”
in Jordan (ibid.: 406) – and appear to be experiencing a
“sharp increase” over the last few years (Cuthbert, 2016).
Born of a belief that girls’ value is in their chastity and that
girls and women who disobey their fathers’ (and male
guardians’) strictures around their chastity have impugned
family honour, honour killings are treated lightly by the
law because victims and perpetrators are from the same
family (Granlund, 2014; Whitman, 2014). Eisner et al.’s (2013)
research, with ninth grade students from 14 government
schools in Jordan, suggests that rates are unlikely to drop
soon. A full 40% of boys and 20% of girls believed that
“killing a daughter, sister, or wife who has dishonoured the
family can be justiﬁed” (p. 405). While neither religion nor
religious intensity predicted adolescents’ attitudes toward
honour killings, boys who experienced harsh discipline
from their fathers – reﬂecting authoritarian patriarchal
parenting – were signiﬁcantly more likely to believe such
crimes are justiﬁed. Impacts on girls, and harsh discipline
from mothers, were not signiﬁcant.
Palestine refugee girls’ experiences with gender-based
violence have not been studied. Findings from the 2012
DHS, however, suggest that those living in camps are likely
especially vulnerable. The DHS, which does not allow us
to disaggregate camp-dwelling girls from camp-dwelling
older women, found that of women over the age of 15, those
living in camps are signiﬁcantly more likely to have ever
experienced any form of violence than those living outside
of camps (30.5% versus 20.7%). They are also more likely
to believe that violence is justiﬁed (79% versus 69.6%).
Mirroring recent work on child marriage, Syrian
refugees’ experiences with gender-based violence have
seen much attention in recent years – albeit with almost
no attempt to disaggregate between girls and adult women
and insuﬃcient focused attention on refugees in Jordan
as opposed to the region more generally. Studies have
found, for example, that more than a quarter of refugee
households living in Jordan ﬂed to that country in part to
escape sexual and gender-based violence (CARE, 2013),
which became increasingly common in Syria after the
onset of the war (IRC, 2012; FIDH, 2012), and that since
their arrival in Jordan up to 50% of girls and women have
experienced violence at the hands of their husbands,
16 Eisener et al. (2013) report that in 2010 it was estimated that there were 20
honour killings a year in Jordan. The Human Rights Watch (2016),
however, reports 26 in 2016 by October (see:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/10/27/recorded-honor-killings-rise-jordan).
Jordanian men and even service providers – some of
whom pressure girls and women into trading sex for the
goods and services they need to ensure their survival
(UNHCR, 2014; IRC, 2014; WRC, 2014). Rates of domestic
violence in particular are reported to be increasing due to
men’s immense stress – brought on by their inability to fulﬁl
the normative expectation that they will provide for their
families (ibid.; see also IRC, 2015; Charles and Denman,
2013). The Interagency assessment also found that in
Jordan, Syrian survivors of violence are more likely to
seek help from family members than from justice oﬃcials
and health care practitioners, even in the case of sexual
violence – perhaps because refugees are relatively less
likely to know what services are available, but also because
some fear being deported if they approach the authorities
(UN Women, 2013; see also Samari, 2016; IRC, 2015).
Critically, in terms of understanding the magnitude and
shape of GBV among the Syrian refugee population, the
Interagency assessment on gender-based violence found
that women were unable to speak openly about GBV –
with a large number either refusing to answer questions
or simply responding “I don’t know” (ibid.). Participants
explained that this is because if survivors speak up then
they could be at risk from further violence from male family
members for “disgracing” the family (see also Hassan et al.,
2015). Indeed, despite evidence that most of the violence
experienced by Syrian girls and women happens in the
home (70%) and at the hands of a husband or someone
else known to the victim (80%) (UNFPA, 2016), girls and
women who participated in the Interagency assessment
focused on sexual harassment in public spaces – including
schools and the marketplace – rather than violence in the
home. Survivors attributed this harassment to growing
hostility towards refugees, which has become acute as
Syria’s civil war drags on and the number of refugees
continues to grow (USAID, 2015; IRC 2014; MoPIC, 2014).
Despite the growing body of research aimed at GBV in
Jordan’s Syrian refugee community, few studies have looked
speciﬁcally at the issues facing Syrian girls. A rare exception
is the IRC’s 2015 Adolescent Girls Assessment – which
included a sizeable sample of Syrian girls. That study found
that girls overall felt Jordan to be a safe place, especially
compared to war-torn Syria, and most were concerned
not about violence per se, but – mirroring the Interagency
assessment of gender-based violence (UN Women, 2013)

14
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
– about sexual harassment from adolescent boys on the
street and at school . They were especially concerned
that boys might follow them to their homes, which in turn
might lead their parents to “blame” the victim and further
restrict their mobility or even remove them from school
(see also USAID, 2015). Girls, and their parents, reported
that their primary response to harassment was to ignore
it. They were afraid of being deported if they complained
about the behaviour of Jordanians. Interestingly, particularly
given girls’ focus on sexual harassment rather than sexual
violence, the Interagency assessment on gender based
violence found that boys are considered to be at greater
risk of sexual violence than girls (for both children under 12
and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17), perhaps
because of their greater risk of being detained (see Figure 6).
2.4 Psychosocial well-being
Research on adolescent girls in Jordan and the broader
MENA region has been broad – and found mixed results.
On the one hand, there is strong evidence that the
continuous, multi-faceted threats that girls face are taking
a toll on their mental health (UNFPA, 2016; Samuels and
Jones, 2015). For example, one study of refugee girls living
in Lebanon found that over half reported symptoms of
clinical depression (Sirin and Sirin-Rogers, 2015). Others
17 Of these girls, about 700 were not accessing IRC services. They were sampled
randomly and were from both cities (35%) and rural villages (54%).
Of ﬁnal respondents, 80% were Syrian and 20% were Jordanian (less than 1% were
“other”).
found that adolescent girls are more likely than their
male peers to feel sad, fearful and depressed; that PTSD
is a growing concern; that they are especially likely to
experience physical and social isolation; and that they are
more likely than boys to engage in suicide ideation (Hassan
et al. 2015; UNFPA, 2014; Sami, 2014). With little mental
health care available (Naufal 2013), adolescents – wary of
adding to their parents’ already considerable stress – have
been found to be especially likely to use withdrawal as a
coping mechanism (Hassan et al. 2015).
On the other hand, the IRC’s 2015 Adolescent Girls
Assessment, which surveyed just under 900 girls aged
13 to 1717, found that while some girls are exhibiting
considerable stress, overall most girls in Jordan are doing
well. They enjoy spending time at school and with their
friends. They ﬁnd meaning in religious activities. Nearly all
(94%) have someone in their lives (usually parents) who
supports them to make decisions. Indeed, of the over 800
girls in their study, 85% of Syrians and 95% of Jordanians
reported being “excited about the future – for a variety of
reasons (see Table 3). The survey also identiﬁed factors
that put girls at risk of mental health issues, namely being
unsure of what their goals are, feeling their goals are not
achievable and lacking familial support. Other research
has also highlighted the importance of familial support and
Figure 6: Overview of programme outcomes by type of change
1.8%
1.6%
2.4%
2.1%
2.8%
2.9%
2.1%
2.3%
1.8%
1.1%
2.6%
1.3%
2.6%
1.6%
2.6%
1.1%
6.7%
7.0%
6.2%
6.9%
4.7%
5.9%
4.1%
5.7%
0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12%
Under 12 - male
Under 12 - female
12-17 - male
12-17 - female
18-25 - male
18-25 - female
Over 25 years - male
Over 25 years - female
A lot Some Occasionally
Source: UN Women, 2013

15
parenting styles to refugee adolescents’ outcomes. For
example, Smetana et al. (2015, 2016) found that greater
hopefulness is associated with a stronger belief in parental
authority, likely because adolescents perceive that it
indicates love and caring.
Research into the psychosocial wellbeing of Jordanian
girls has largely focused on depression and eating
disorders. A study of over 8,000 students between the
ages of 14 and 25 found that girls and young people who
had been exposed to violence were particularly likely to
exhibit depressive symptoms (Ismayilova et al. 2013). It
also found that while young people with better parent-child
relationships were less likely to exhibit symptoms, only half
reported that they were able to share their problems with
their parents. Another study, with nearly 1,000 adolescents
attending secondary school, found that while boys are
more likely to engage in non-suicidal self-injury than girls,
girls are especially likely to engage in cutting, which is
arguably a more dangerous form of self-injury (rather than
punching themselves) (Hanania et al. 2015). Other recent
research has focused on Jordanian girls’ increasingly
complicated relationships with food, which is no doubt
complicated by climbing rates of obesity. Mousa (2010), for
example, found that out of a sample of 300 girls between
the ages of 10 and 16 who were attending private schools
in Jordan, over 40% had a negative attitude towards
eating and over a third had an eating disorder. Noting that
plumpness has traditionally been valued in Arab cultures,
as it indicates good health and fertility, Mousa concluded
that young Jordanian girls had assimilated western values
of beauty from the constant media messages with which
they are surrounded. Using a sample of young women at
university in Jordan, Gable (2014) also found high rates
of body dysmorphia and eating disorders. Gearing (2013)
found that despite the fact that girls and young women
appear to be especially susceptible to some forms of
mental health issues, they are also more stigmatised
for their suﬀering –and less likely to receive treatment.
Study participants reported that they were more likely to
accept depressed adolescent boys, rather than girls, at
their children’s schools, and more likely to hire untreated
than treated females (for a hypothetical job opening).
Critically for adolescent girls and young women, the fear
of damaging marriage prospects appears to preclude
treatment (ibid.).
The psychosocial well-being of Palestine refugee girls’
in Jordan appears to have not been studied. We know
that Palestinian adolescents in Jordan are less likely than
other adolescent refugees to respect parental authority,
and more likely to be rebellious and exhibit emotional
distress (Smetana et al., 2015, 2016). We also know from
populations of Palestine refugee girls in Gaza that they
are often lonely and bored, because their mobility is
restricted, and more likely to be depressed and anxious
than boys because they have less access to the agency
that allows them to work towards their goals (Hamad et al.,
2015). However, there does not appear to have been any
research undertaken with Palestine refugee girls in Jordan.
They were not included in the IRC’s (2015) Adolescent
Girls Assessment and Smetana et al. (2015, 2016) did not
simultaneously disaggregate by gender and ethnicity.
There have been a great many recent studies aimed at
exploring the psychosocial well-being and mental health
concerns of Syrian refugee girls. As noted above, most
have not focused on girls living in Jordan or have not
disaggregated girls by age or adolescents by gender. Of
the Jordan-based research, the Interagency assessment
of gender-based violence in Jordan found that stress on
families had generally increased tensions between parents
and their children (UN Women, 2013) and adolescents in
Table 3: Reasons girls are optimistic or pessimistic
Reasons for optimism Reasons for pessimism
Feel future plans are achievable 72% Feel future plans are not achievable 30%
Have support of family 15% Do not have support of family 19%
Have ﬁnancial support 1% Do not ave ﬁnancial support 6%
Need to excel 3% Do not have support of anyone else 3%
Next steps are clear 7% Not sure what to do next 31%
Attending school 3% Don’t attend school 11%
Source: IRC, 2015

16
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
UNICEF and IMC’s (2014) research reported that their
parents were consequently resorting to physical violence
as a form of discipline more often. However, that study,
which included over 2,000 Syrian adolescents, some living
in Za’atari camp and others living in host communities,
found that it was threats outside the family which
adolescents felt to be the most compelling. Indeed, their
largest complaint was poor treatment from Jordanians
(especially for those living outside of the camp), followed
by fear of more violence, lack of education and sadness
about the family they had left behind in Syria (see Figure
7). Adolescents reported that they were verbally bullied, for
being Syrian or for being a refugee, and were threatened
with or experienced physical violence, including having
head scarves ripped oﬀ. This theme of being made to feel
unwelcome was echoed by adolescent girls in IRC’s (2015)
Adolescent Girls Assessment and USAID’s (2015) National
Youth Assessment. Syrian girls reported that not only were
they harassed by Jordanian boys, but also that they were
bullied by Jordanian girls. This was particularly the case in
cities, where Jordanians and Syrians tend to attend school
in diﬀerent shifts, which reinforces notions of “otherness”.
UNICEF and IMC’s (2014) study found that adolescent
girls tend to have more emotional distress than adolescent
boys – despite the fact that boys report more diﬃculties
and are less likely to feel supported by their parents and
their friends. Girls feel unsafe away from their parents, are
more isolated and conﬁned and report more depression,
tension, sadness and fear than boys. Mothers of girls
in IRC’s (2015) research concurred that some girls are
Figure 7: General problems for displaced Syrian adolescents
0% 10%20%30%40% 50% 60%
Sad about Syria
Theft
Distance btwn school, home
Kidnapping
Poor housing
Family injured/died in war
Water
Separated from family
Poor treatment from Jordanians
Fear airplanes, bombs
Education
Sad about family Syria
Nightmares
Fear war
Source: UNICEF and IMC, 2014
Box 3: A window to the world
Adolescents in Jordan spend hours a day online. In their study of 400 teens in
7th to 12th grades, Darweesh and Mahmoud
(2014) found that they average 3.5 hours day—with most accessing the internet on
their phones or laptops. While girls and boys
are equally likely to spend time online, the sites that they visit are markedly
diﬀerent. Girls are more likely to visit educational
sites and boys are more likely to visit social media, sports and pornographic
sites (Darweesh and Mahmoud, 2014).
Maitland and Xu (2015) found that Syrian young people also use their phones to
connect with the world. They found that 86%
of Syrian youth owned their own mobile phones and 83% owned their own SIM cards.
For girls, especially those who are conﬁned to home, these virtual experiences
can be a window to the world that mitigates
isolation and loneliness (USAID, 2015; King Hussein Foundation, 2016). The IRC’s
(2015) Adolescent Girls Assessment found
that TV is a primary form of entertainment for girls, as they are only rarely
allowed to leave home for recreational purposes,
and that WhatsApp and Facebook help girls connect with others. While many girls
did not have their own phones, since
phones are expensive and parents are concerned that they might expose girls to
harm, girls without their own phones
frequently use their mothers’. The King Hussein Foundation (2016) found that for
girls who have been removed from school,
TV is not just entertainment. It is the only window they have into a world
diﬀerent from their own.

17
struggling. Those whose daughters had given up mobility
reported that their daughters were depressed by being
conﬁned to the home, even if they understood that it was
for their own safety (IRC, 2015) (see Box 3). Impacts are
magniﬁed for those living outside of Za’atari. UNICEF and
IMC’s (2014) study found that children in the camp felt
better supported and exhibited more emotional resilience.
The Adolescent Girls Assessment concluded that
Syrian girls’ pessimism has two fundamental roots (see
Table 3). First, they are restricted by their refugee status,
which “imposes a burden on girls to move freely, access
education, obtain work permissions and opportunities,
and access self-development opportunities especially
at the professional level.” Second, girls are trapped by
gender roles, which largely limit their futures to marriage
and motherhood and close off other aspirations they
might have (IRC, 2015; see also USAID, 2015). Married girls
are particularly trapped by the latter. Not only are they
exposed to early and forced sexual activity, often with a
man a generation older, but Save the Children (2014) found
that they felt very unready to assume the role of mother.
2.5 Voice and agency
In Jordan, and across the MENA region, gender norms
largely preclude women and girls from accessing voice
and agency (World Bank, 2013). Socialised since childhood
to “accept control and oppression”, Jordanian girls and
women can travel only with the permission of their fathers
or husbands, must renounce all property rights in order
to initiate divorce and are not given legal guardianship
over their children even when they are granted physical
custody (Ismayilova et al, 2013: 138). While the laws that
limit women’s options are important, the World Bank (2013)
notes that women’s agency remains primarily restricted not
by law, but as a result of the social norms that play out on a
daily basis. Those norms conﬁne women to the household,
forcing them to shape their lives around their husbands
and their children, and preclude their access to all forms of
decision-making because their voices are considered less
important than those of boys and men (ibid.).
Ahmad et al. (2015) observes that in addition to
“oppressive” gender norms, Arab cultures also emphasize
generational hierarchies, with even adult children expected
to accede to their parents’ demands and adolescents
seen as immature and in need of monitoring and control.
Parents stress traditional values, including obedience
and interdependence, and adolescents are expected to
conform to tradition and uphold family honour (see also
USAID, 2015; Smetana, 2016). Recent research, however,
paints a more nuanced picture. On the one hand, USAID’s
(2015) National Youth Assessment found that Jordanian
and Syrian adolescents and young adults feel that that
adults do not listen to them and are pessimistic about
making change happen – especially in public spaces. On
the other hand, in terms of their personal lives, Smetana
(2015) found that adolescents in Jordan are increasingly
“normative” and see parental control as “bounded”. That
is, while it is perceived as legitimate in some contexts
(e.g. those that are risky or touch on morality), teens –
regardless of age, parental education and socio-economic
status – are increasingly unlikely to bow to their parents’
wishes about how they choose for friends or spend their
leisure time.
There is little information about the voice and agency
of speciﬁc populations of adolescent girls in Jordan. While
the authors above agree that as girls are restricted by both
gender and age they have especially little freedom, and
are largely parented to encourage “submission”, there has
been little research directed at ascertaining whether and
how the lives of Jordanian girls, Palestine refugee girls
and Syrian girls diﬀer in terms of their access to even the
most concrete outcomes – such as mobility or input into
decision-making regarding their own education. USAID’s
(2015) National Youth Assessment, which included both
Jordanian and Syrian girls between the ages of 10 and 24,
found that as a group girls feel “infantalised” by society.
They have few places outside of Qur’anic centres (and in
recent years UNICEF support Makani centres, see below)
were they can participate on a regular basis and even
within the family are permitted only to propose solutions
to “small problems”. The IRC’s (2015) Adolescent Girls
Assessment, which also included Jordanian and Syrian
girls, remained even more general. In terms of voice and
agency it concluded only that girls are expected to obey
their parents, dress modestly, speak softly and politely and
attend to “home business” – doing chores for their parents
while they wait to marry. Al Gharaibeh (2016), in his study
of young people between the ages of 18 and 24, found that
girls and women perceived higher barriers to participation
across all domains – educational, economic, health, social
and political – than boys and young men.
The King Hussein Foundation (2016) found that
adolescent Jordanian girls see marked declines in their
mobility with the onset of puberty (see Figure 8). After

18
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
comparatively free childhoods, girls are confined to
home until they are not only married, but have children.
Even then, however, girls’ access to voice and agency is
limited. The 2012 Jordan DHS found that of married girls
between the ages of 15 and 19, only 43.4% were allowed
input into decision-making regarding their own health care
and mobility and household purchasing (compared to
65.1% for all women aged 15-49). Furthermore, Ismayilova
et al. (2013) found evidence that girls who attempt to
access agency may face backlash. They reported that
of girls between the ages of 14 and 25, the most religious
demonstrated the lowest levels of depressive symptoms.
They attributed this to greater familial and community
resistance aimed at girls who believed in gender equality.
In terms of Palestine refugee girls, Ahmad et al. (2015),
working with nearly 500 camp dwelling adolescents
between the ages of 14 and 17, found that girls were more
closely monitored by parents than were boys and were
also more likely to disclose information about their lives
to their mothers. The latter appears primarily related to
the fact that boys engage in more activities about which
they did not want their mothers to know (Ahmad et al.,
2015), but may also be related to the fact that girls are
more likely to report a higher belief in parental authority
than boys (Smetana et all, 2015). While Smetana et al.
(2016) did not simultaneously disaggregate their ﬁndings
by ethnicity and gender, their research suggests both are
likely true. Both Palestinians and boys in their sample were
less likely to be considered “normative” and more likely to
be “rebellious” – meaning that they undertook more of their
own decision-making.
Syrian girls appear to have especially limited access
to voice and agency as with few exceptions they not only
have “no opportunities to channel their voice in Jordan
Figure 8: Girls’ mobility over time
Birth Childhood Puberty Married with children
Age
Mobility
Given the domestic conﬁnement of homebound
girls, the most social interaction that they have is
through such television series which portray a
lifestyle very diﬀerent to their reality.
Source: King Hussein Foundation, 2016
Figure 9: How often do family members leave the house?
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
Every day A f ew times a week Rarely Never
47.3%
23.2 %
15.0% 13. 7%
32.5%
25.8%
20.4%
20.6%
26.9%
31.5%
23.7%
17.5%
68.4%
16.6%
8.2% 6.4%
Boys Girls Women Men
Source: UN Women, 2013

19
or to be civically active” (USAID, 2015: 8), but also have
particularly little access to decision-making within their
own families. Authors have focused on girls’ lack of say
in their own marriages – which are arranged by their
fathers – and their especially poor mobility, which is often
even worse than it was in Syria and can even preclude
their access to education (UNFPA, 2016; IRC, 2015). For
example while over 47% of adolescent boys leave home
on a daily basis, less than 33% of girls do so (see Figure 9)
(UN Women, 2013).
2.6 Economic empowerment
Even within MENA, which on a regional basis has the
world’s lowest rate of female labour force participation
– 21.3% in 2014 compared to a global rate of 39% that
same year18 – Jordanian women are unlikely to work. In
2014, the country’s female labour force participation rate
was only 18.4%. While markedly higher than 1990’s 11%,
women’s employment rate is less than a quarter of that
of men’s19. Furthermore, despite low participation rates,
Jordanian women also experience high unemployment
rates, more than twice that of men (19.5% versus 9.2% in
2014). The World Bank (2013) observes that while men are
more likely to be unemployed if they are uneducated, the
reverse is true for women. In Jordan, the most educated
women are the most likely to be unemployed. A similar
pattern holds for marriage. While married men are more
likely to be employed, married women are much less
likely to be employed. The Bank (2013) also notes that
labour market segmentation has kept women out of high
productivity sectors. Nearly half of employed women work
in the public sector, which is viewed as the only “socially
acceptable” form of employment for women because
the hours are compatible with marriage and motherhood
(ibid.). Unsurprisingly, most women (69%) work in services
such as education and health care (GoJ, 2017).
While Jordanian women support the notion of women’s
employment, with 80% rejecting the beliefs that full-time
employment prevents a woman from having a good life
with her husband or means that she cannot be a good
mother, most also still believe that men have greater rights
to employment than women (World Bank, 2013). Amongst
women, 85% believe that when jobs are scarce they should
go to men (versus 90% of men) (ibid.).
18 See: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.FE.ZS?view=chart
19 Using comparable modeled ILO estimates, rates were 16% and 67% respectively
in 2014. See: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.
FE.ZS?view=chart
Jordanian women are also less likely than men to own
assets or have access to credit. The Government reports
that while 73.8% of men own land, only 21.3% of women
do. Similarly, while 69.5% of men own ﬂats, only 25.6% of
women do. Of those taking out loans from commercial
banks, more than 80% are men (GoJ, 2017).
Given the broader context of women’s employment,
it is not surprising that Jordanian girls and young women
are unlikely to be employed. The Jordanian government
reports that in 2014, 7.8% of young women between the
ages of 15 and 24 were employed, compared to 36.8% of
young men (GoJ, 2017). Furthermore, rates of employment
for young women – and especially for adolescent girls
– appear to be dropping over time. Disaggregating
government ﬁgures, USAID (2014) reports that in 2013 only
.1% of girls between the ages of 15 and 18 were employed,
down from .6% in 2010, with employment rates for young
women 19-24 falling from 18.5% to 15.4% over the same time
frame. Youth unemployment ﬁgures show a similar pattern.
The 2014 rate for young women 15-24 was 53.3% (up from
37.1% in 2010) and for young men was 26.3% (up from 23.1%
in 2010). Vocational training is a path that few Jordanian
young people pursue (GoJ, 2014). A government survey
found that while most older adolescents and young adults
were aware that classes and programmes were available
to them, fewer than 10% had ever participated. Of those,
nearly 90% had taken a single class. (ibid.). Most young
people indicated that they simply were not interested.
USAID (2015) observes that for girls and young women,
many of whom have high career aspirations that they are
afraid to voice because their families do not share their
views, “social constructs rather than choice determine
whether they will work at all, and if they do work, in what
type of occupation” (p.6). Indeed, restrictive gender norms
precluding most girls and women not only from having a
career, but also from pursuing casual employment . The
World Bank (2013) adds that even when girls and women
are allowed by their families to undertake employment,
their options for finding a job are further limited by
convention, as they are “restricted to using indirect,
anonymous methods of job search, such as sending an
application or registering at a labor oﬃce” (p. 53). This is in
contrast to their male peers, who use more direct methods
such as phone calls and asking friends and relatives for

20
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
help. Finally, even when they are employed, girls and young
women are less likely to have control over their own income
than are boys and young men or older women. The 2012
DHS found that only 21.4% of employed women between
the ages of 20 and 24 had primary control over their own
cash income (compared to 34.7% for women aged 25-29).
Girls were especially unlikely to have any say over their
husbands’ incomes. Of married girls aged 15-19, only 47.3%
had joint decision making over their husbands’ incomes,
compared to 64.6% of women aged 20-24 (GoJ and ICF
International, 2013).
Palestine refugee girls’ access to economic
empowerment largely mirrors that of their Jordanian
peers. Tiltnes and Zhang (2013) found that female youth
labour force participation was minimal – less than 1% for
girls between the ages of 15 and 19 and only 13% for young
women between the ages of 20 and 24 – regardless of
camp versus non-camp residence. They also found that
marriage impacts young Palestine refugees’ employment
rates, with male youth 20% more likely to work after
marriage than before but female youth much less likely
to do so. Employment rates plunged from 30% before
marriage to only 5% after and declines were steeper for
young women living in host communities, presumably
reﬂecting their lower likelihood of poverty. Tiltnes and
Zhang (2013) also found that some Palestine refugee
girls and young women would like to work, but are not
allowed to do so by their families. Six percent of those in
host communities, and double that in the more traditional
camps, reported that they were not allowed to work.
Little is known about Syrian girls’ access to economic
empowerment, although much can be assumed given the
poverty of the population, the mobility constraints girls
face and the positions girls occupy in their families. Indeed,
the fact that USAID’s (2015) National Youth Assessment
found that Syrian adolescent girls wanted to become ﬂight
attendants, pharmacists, doctors and teachers – while
young Syrian women wanted to get married – speaks
volumes. Critically, employment for Syrian girls appears to
be far more of an indicator for their child protection needs
rather than for their economic empowerment. UN Women
(2013) found that there was a strong correlation between
household size and adolescent girls’ employment, with the
largest families the most likely to have sent their daughters
to work. Their assessment also found that of employed
adolescent girls, 80% worked in agriculture or domestic
service – both high risk sectors in terms of physical and
sexual exploitation. The literature is oddly silent about
whether it is becoming more common for refugee girls
to take on domestic service as their families’ economic
situations continue to decline. On the one hand, many
Jordanian families employ domestic workers – making it a
readily available job. On the other hand, parents’ concerns
about girls’ safety suggest that it may remain quite rare.

21
On the one hand, there are a wide variety of actors working
to create change in the lives of adolescent girls living in
Jordan. These include not only the Jordanian government
and a wide variety of UN and humanitarian agencies, but
also over a dozen international and national NGOs. While
many of the interventions in progress target refugee families
more generally (e.g with cash transfers, food vouchers,
and WASH infrastructure), and many more interventions
broadly target children or women (e.g. educational or
gender based violence programming), a growing number
of actors are now also providing girls’ clubs speciﬁcally
for adolescent girls. However, while refugee girls – and
vulnerable Jordanian girls in host communities – have a
great many interventions aimed at improving their lives,
there has yet to be any concerted attention to evaluation.
If we are to understand what encourages, or prevents,
change in the social norms that shape girls’ daily lives, so
that we can better tailor policy and programming, we need
to ask girls what is working for them.
Before turning to the actors about whom we do
have information, it should be noted that a key gap in
our understanding programming for girls is the role that
religious organizations are playing in their lives. While our
work on the ground suggests that for many girls Qur’anic
centres are lifelines – as they are the only place outside
of the home that girls are allowed to go, existent research
barely acknowledges their existence. Research also does
not address Christian missionary eﬀorts, which for Iraqi
refugee girls appear to be signiﬁcant.
3.1 Main actors
Actors working at scale in Jordan include the Jordanian
government and a variety of UN agencies – plus DfID
and USAID. It should be noted that a great deal of large-
scale programming is the result of partnerships between
organisations, and that donors are playing key roles in
strengthening the services that the Jordanian government
is providing. Below we highlight some of the main change
strategies that actors are employing.
The Jordanian Government
In part driven by the 2016 Jordan Compact, the Jordanian
Government is a key player in helping adolescent girls –
and their families – develop their capabilities. Not only
has it granted the vast majority of Palestine refugee
families full citizenship, but it is taking steps to ramp up
services to better meet the needs of Syrian families and
prevent Jordanian families from experiencing further
service degradation due to overload. In particular, the
government recognises that even if the war in Syria were to
end tomorrow, rebuilding the country and repatriating the
population will take years. Consequently, the government
is focused not only on short-term humanitarian relief,
but also on the longer-term development programming
needed to promote resilience and ensure that refugee
and host populations “cope”, “recover” and “sustain” their
capacities (MoPIC, 2016).
The most recent Jordan Response Plan (MoPIC, 2016)
is multi-sectoral and aimed broadly – meaning that many
of its components are not directly relevant to adolescent
girls (e.g. scaling up efficient energy and protecting
vulnerable ecosystems). Other components, such as
strengthening the health care system (which provides
free primary and secondary care to refugees as well as
nationals) and improving access to justice services for
survivors of GBV, include girls as an ancillary population,
but are not especially focused on meeting their daily
needs. The Jordanian approach to education, however, is
directly aimed at meeting the needs of girls and boys for a
quality education. Since 2012, with technical support from
UNICEF (under its Emergency Education response, see
below) and funding from a range of donors including the EU
and the US, the government has provided free education
to Syrian children that roughly mirrors that it provides to
Jordanian and Palestinian children.
UNICEF
UNICEF’s programming in Jordan is significant and
multifaceted. In addition to the more girl-targeted responses
detailed below, it has upgraded camp WASH facilities,
provides recreational spaces for camp-dwelling children,
3 Actors for change

22
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
oﬀers parenting classes, teaches child-friendly pedagogy
and supports a Juvenile Police Department (UNICEF,
2016b). It also, beginning in 2015, provides an unconditional
Child Cash Grant to assist the most vulnerable Syrian
refugee families living in host communities. The grant
consists of a monthly cash transfer of $28/month/child
– capped at $106 for 4 children per family – and aims to
increase spending on child-speciﬁc needs and prevent
families from adopting negative coping strategies that
aﬀect child wellbeing. In 2015, the programme assisted
55,000 children from 15,000 of the most vulnerable
refugee families, with eligibility based on poverty and
protection status as identiﬁed through the Inter-Agency
Vulnerability Assessment Framework (UNICEF 2015b).
UNICEF’s Emergency Education Response (EER) is
directly aﬀecting the lives of thousands of adolescent
girls. THE EER has supported the Jordanian Ministry of
Education to provide education to Syrian refugee children.
It has also worked with donors and NGOs to develop
and implement a wide range of non-formal education
programmes for children who do not have access to
government schools. A recent evaluation found that the
programme has been broadly successful in terms of
helping children access education – with over 130,000
Syrian children enrolled in formal schooling and another
35,000 provided with informal or non-formal opportunities.
That evaluation also noted, however, that nearly 40% of
students lack access to formal education and quality –
especially for Syrians20 in double-shifted schools – is low
(Culbertson et al., 2016).
The No Lost Generation Initiative, which was launched
in 2013 by UNICEF, UNHCR, Save the Children, World
Vision, Mercy Corp and other actors, is also impacting
the lives of adolescent girls. The Initiative, which is running
in 5 refugee hosting countries in MENA (Jordan, Turkey,
Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt) aims to improve children’s
access to educational and psychosocial services and open
opportunities for young people to meaningful participate
in the world around them (NoLostGeneration, 2016).
Speciﬁc programming is varied, depending on children’s
age and country, but school aged children in Jordan –
including adolescents – have access to Makani Centres,
which are oﬀered on the premises of community-based
organizations and have a “holistic approach that provides…
learning opportunities, life skills training and psychosocial
support under one roof” (UNICEF, 2017) (see Figure 10).
20 Syrians tend to attend the afternoon shift, which is shorter than the morning
shift
Jordan’s 233 Makani centres (UNICEF, 2016c) oﬀer a wide
range of activities including e-learning (in partnership with
Orange Jordan), vocational training, referrals to for health
services, interactive theatre, participatory action research
(UNICEF, 2016a,c; UNICEF, 2015d). In 2016 the programme
reached 146,000 children, the majority of whom (88%)
were Syrian refugees (UNICEF, 2016c).
UNICEF is working in Jordan to develop opportunities
for Palestinian young people to develop leadership skills
and participate in civic life. Programming will be oﬀered in
UNRWA schools and adolescent-friendly spaces hosted
by CBOs and will include life-skills education. UNICEF is
also expanding options for young people’s engagement
through its “UCAN network”, which links adolescents
and young adults with one another and oﬀers them the
opportunity to plan and evaluate programming – including
through social media.
UNICEF Jordan is actively involved in preventing child
marriage and gender-based violence and is working to
deliver services to survivors (UNICEF, 2015e). It helped
develop, and is now implementing, an early marriage
action plan that includes community awareness-
raising, empowering girls through Makani centres and
comprehensive case management. It also runs a women’s
shelter and provides services to child survivors of GBV in
both camps and host communities.
Figure 10: The comprehensive approach of
Makanis
Mobility
Community
Outreach
Peer to
Peer
Community
and Youth
Networks
Learning Feeling
Doing
MAKANI
Education
Skills Building
Community
Supported PSS
Source: UNICEF, 2016

23
UNICEF has also heavily invested in research aimed at
identifying and exploring the threats facing adolescent girls.
It addition to work exploring access to education, the impact
of poverty and the incidence and drivers of child marriage,
UNICEF also helped the country complete its ﬁrst National
Youth Survey. Including 12,000 young people between
the ages of 10 and 24, the survey aims to inform both the
National Youth Strategy as well as direct programming.
UNWRA
The UNWRA provides services to Palestine refugees
displaced by the 1948 and 1967 conﬂicts. In Jordan, it runs
10 oﬃcial camps, 174 schools – serving nearly 120,000
children, and provides 23 primary health care centres – half
of which are located in camps and half of which are located
in host communities with high Palestinian populations
(UNRWA, 2016). It also supports 3,500 students in higher
education, subsidizes some of the cost for complicated
medical care undertaken at government facilities (such
as high risk maternity care), and runs 14 Women Centres
(ibid.). In addition, the UNRWA runs the Social Safety
Net Programme, which provides the poorest Palestinian
families with a cash grant. In Jordan, the programme
provides nearly 12,000 families with an e-card worth about
$115/per person/per year.
UNRWA also provides programming for children and
adolescents – largely through its schools. Its Education in
Emergencies response, for example, includes the provision
of psychosocial support, survival skills and alternative
learning modalities for refugee children. The agency has
recruited and trained counsellors which not only give
individual support to Palestine refugee children, but also
conduct recreational activities. The recreational activities
are primarily play and learning activities, but there are also
behavioural and emotion group-based games, which help
to support healing and recovery and identify children who
need further support. In addition to its school based work,
UNRWA’s Children and Youth Programme works through
local CSOs and aims to provide recreation and promote
participation. Its Education Programme also organises
awareness raising activities for adolescents and their
parents (UNRWA, 2016b).
UNRWA is also implementing, in conjunction with
UNICEF, a programme called “Palestinian Adolescents:
Agents of Positive Change” (Peebles, 2015). Launched as
a multi-country initiative in 2004, and implemented slightly
diﬀerently across countries, in Jordan the programme
has focussed on camp-dwelling adolescents and helping
them to develop a sense of identity and belonging. UNRWA
adapted the programme’s participatory action research
to ﬁt into its school curriculum and has implemented it in
all of its schools. While the ﬁrst phase of the programme
overwhelming beneﬁted boys (80-90% of participants),
UNRWA has made a concerted effort to reach out to
parents, hold diﬀerent activities at diﬀerent time for girls
and boys and hire female facilitators. In the most recent
phase, 65% of beneﬁciaries were girls. A 2015 evaluation
of the programme made special note of its participatory
action research, which – while expensive to implement –
was found to return particularly large beneﬁts not only to
adolescent participants, but also to their communities.
UN Women
UN Women is running a large number of programmes in
Jordan, some inside of camps and some outside of camps.
Programming modalities tend to be diverse and layered.
Oasis for Women and Girls, for example, runs inside of
Za’atari and aims to empower Syrian girls and women
through a range of activities including i) creating safe
spaces that host regular women’s meetings, ii) providing
life skills and literacy education that includes child care, iii)
oﬀering cash-for-work for food insecure households, iv)
referral services for those with speciﬁc legal- or disability-
related concerns, v) serving GBV survivors and and vi)
engagement with boys and men through activities such
as #Hefor She.
Outside of Za’atari, UN Women is working to address
trigger points for conﬂict – namely overextended service
delivery and unemployment – in ways that also promote
women’s empowerment and gender equality. Through
the Restoring Dignity Project, for instance, the agency is
creating short-term employment opportunities, including
in ICT, hospitality, agriculture and the garment industry,
for vulnerable Jordanian households. Though its Social
Cohesion and Gender Equality Programme it helps women
create jobs by providing access to microﬁnance and social
entrepreneurship support and to feed their families by
teaching them how to grow kitchen gardens. It also
engages Syrian and Jordanian adolescents in sports as a
way to foster dialogues and grow understanding between
groups of young people.
UN Women is also working to strengthen government
and NGO systems that support adolescent girls. The
Social Cohesion and Gender Equality Programme,

24
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
for example, is engaged across levels and sectors. It is
working in communities, with health care and protection
providers, to extend reach and capacity and with the
MoSD to extend its employment programme. In addition,
UN Women’s Oasis progamme provides the government
with technical assistance in the areas of gender equality
and women’s empowerment and its Hemayati project is
working to expand and strengthen national and subnational
responses to gender based violence.
UNFPA
The UNFPA partners with the Jordanian government,
other UN agencies, NGOs, foundations and the private
sector to promote maternal and newborn health, gender
equality and reproductive health, and the collection and
analysis data relating to population dynamics. Since 2012,
UNFPA has supplemented its regular country-level work
with emergency programming aimed at the Syrian crisis
(UNFPA, 2012).
UNFPA is, for example, working with the MoH to
improve comprehensive SRH care to women and girls
in 17 centres (UNFPA, 2016b). It is also providing 17 safe
spaces (8 in camps) for women and girls to meet and
learn about their rights. Participants are oﬀered life-skills
education, counselling and – where needed – conﬁdential
and coordinated GBV services. Safe spaces have tailored
activities for young women.
Aimed more speciﬁcally at adolescents, UNFPA also
runs Youth Centres that provide targeted services and
participatory activities for young people. These include
recreation, health education, and life skills and also use
mobile approaches to build awareness. In terms of speciﬁc
youth-focused interventions, UNFPA is implementing
Shobak Sehetna, Shababna, and Y-PEER. The ﬁrst revolves
around a six day camp that uses interactive activities to
encourage young people to adopt a healthy life style. The
second is aimed at at-risk youth and helps motivate them
to make smart choices regarding reproductive health and
rights. Y-Peer is a network of NGOs and young people
who advocate for youth engagement and adolescent
reproductive health services. It uses peer education and
engaging modalities such as street theatre to empower
young people to make healthy choices. In Jordan, the
programme has trained hundreds of camp-dwelling young
people to reach out to their peers about reproductive
health, GBV and child marriage.
UNHCR
Syrian refugees registered with the UNHCR are eligible
for a wide range of beneﬁts, including health care and
cash transfers. The latter are structured around three
interlinked programmes – one provided directly by
UNHCR, one provided by the World Food Programme
(see below) and one provided by UNICEF (see below).
UNHCR’s transfer was originally designed in 2012 to
be universal. However, owing to budget constraints it is
now poverty targeted. Monthly cash assistance ranges
from $75 to $400 – depending on household size and
vulnerability – and averages about a $127/month (UNHCR,
2016). In late 2016, the transfer was reaching about 32,000
Syrian families – with another 11,000 on the waiting list
(Hagen-Zanker, 2017). A recent assessment found that
nearly all beneﬁciaries use the transfer to pay rent and
that the reduced stress of stabilising living arrangements
is resulting in higher levels of wellbeing (ibid.).
UNHCR is partnering with UNICEF on the No Lost
Generation Initiative (see below) and with UNFPA on a task
force dedicated to preventing forced and early marriage
and mitigating the consequences for girls and women
already married. It also provides psychosocial support
services to children, including to adolescent girls, and
works towards family reuniﬁcation for children who have
become separated from their families due to the Civil War.
DFID is heavily vested in providing humanitarian
assistance and services for the most vulnerable in refugee
camps and host communities. It is not only working with
the Government of Jordan, UNICEF, UNRWA and UNHCR
to strengthen and extend public services – including
education – but is also working to support job creation
and promote longer term stability (DfID, 2017).] Its Jordan
Compact Education Programme, for example, is aiming
to get 58,000 refugee children enrolled in school for the
2016/2017 school year, making sure that no child is left
un-schooled.
In terms of adolescent girls more speciﬁcally, DﬁD is
providing support to a number of NGO partners including
Mercy Corps.
USAID
USAID is working to strengthen Jordan’s health and
education systems, building infrastructure and human
capacity to meet the demand incurred by the Syrian refugee
ﬂow (USAID, 2016). A key partner in the No Lost Generation
Initiative, it has already built 28 new schools and expanded

25
97 (USAID, 2016), as well as trained over 11,000 female MoE
education professionals on better teaching methods. It has
also trained over a 100 female community health workers
who have provided over 400,000 women with information
about women’s health and family planning (USAID, 2017).
Gender equality and women’s empowerment are key
priorities for USAID – which is working with the government
and NGOs to change social norms and expand women’s
political and economic participation. In addition to
programmes oﬀered through the education and health
sectors, USAID provides micro-finance and business
development programmes to female entrepreneurs. It has
also launched the Takamol Gender program, which is a
three-year initiative aimed at empowering the government,
CSOs and individuals to address challenges facing gender
equity, gender mainstreaming and female empowerment
(USAID, 2017). It is also supporting the Circle of Peace,
which is an initiative that involves Syrian women in
peacebuilding activities.
USAID is heavily involved in supporting research. For
example, in 2015 it funded the National Youth Assessment
– which among other topics explored the ways in which
adolescent girls and young women were particularly
excluded from all domains of Jordanian life.
WFP
The WFP voucher programme was introduced for those
living in host communities in 2012 – and later in Za’atari
camp – to help create some sense of normalcy for Syrian
refugees by allowing them to shop in regular supermarkets
for their preferred foods and to oﬀer them access to a
greater diversity of foods with higher nutritional value (Luce
2014). The WFP programme has shifted completely to
electronic vouchers aside from the daily distribution of
bread in camps (owing to concerns about the government
bread subsidy), with each refugee receiving monthly
vouchers based on the cost of a basic food basket which
provides approximately 2,100 kcals/person/day. The WFP
is currently oﬀering the voucher programme to 95,000
beneficiaries in refugee camps and 430,000 in host
communities (Roeth et al., forthcoming). The voucher is
currently worth $21/per person/per month (WFP, 2016b;
Jordan Times, 2016). The WFP is also supporting the
Jordanian government to feed over 300,000 school
children and distributes 20 tons of bread each day in
refugee camps (WFP, 2016). It also runs cash-for-work
programmes in refugee camps.
The WFP does not have any programming aimed
speciﬁcally at adolescent girls.
3.2 NGO Partners
The work of the Jordanian Government and UN agencies
is supported by a wide array of international and national
NGOs, many of which provide at least some adolescent
girl-focused programming. Here we cover those which are
working at scale – or are oﬀering innovative programming
for girls – in alphabetical order (for a more complete list of
the GAGE learning partners, see the Annex).
The Arab Renaissance for Democracy and
Development aims to contribute to a just and stable
society free of inequality and conﬂict. It works to empower
the marginalised to realise their rights by representing their
needs to duty bearers and encouraging those individuals
and institutions to conform to the rule of law. It provides
free legal and psychosocial support services, especially
to refugees, and focused on women and gender and youth
empowerment. In Za’atari it is running sessions for boys and
men to give them space to talk about the issues impacting
their lives, while also raising awareness of GBV and helping
men realise how they can support women’s empowerment.
It is also running sessions for women, aimed at increasing
their civic engagement.
CARE, which has worked in Jordan since 1948 when it
began to meet the needs of Palestine refugees displaced
by Israel, runs a multi-sectoral programme that centres
on three areas: emergency response for refugees and
host communities, women and girls empowerment and
civil society strengthening (CARE, 2015b). As part of
its emergency response, CARE manages a protection
programme through community centres in urban areas
. Case workers address families’ economic and social
vulnerabilities with the aim of reducing the stress on
families that forces them to choose negative coping
mechanisms such as child marriage or child labour. Case
workers also work to detect VAWG and child abuse and
refer survivors to specialised agencies for targeted care.
In addition, in 2014, CARE partnered with the UNHCR to
open Azraq camp. CARE’s women and girls’ empowerment
programme is multi-level, working with CSOs and women’s
social movements to advocate for policy, with men and
boys to change social norms and with women to form
Village Savings and Loans Associations that can help
improve women’s economic participation – and ultimately
their access to decision-making.

26
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
The Danish Refugee Council has worked in Jordan
since 2003, when it responded to the growing number
of Iraqi refugees ﬂeeing the US-led invasion. The DRC
runs Community Centres that oﬀer, to both refugees and
Jordanians in host communities, information sessions,
life-skills trainings, psychosocial support activities, safe
areas for children, women, and men, sports activities, and
community events. Centres have beneﬁted more than
10,000 individuals thus far, 60% of women are women and
girls (DRC, 2017).
The DRC also runs ﬁve Women’s Resource Centres
in Jordan. They provide specialised case management
services to survivors of gender-based violence and at-risk
adolescents. Its Proactive Participatory Programme, for
married and unmarried girls, combines innovative methods
such as ﬁeld trips with life skills education, engagement with
husbands, livelihoods training and cash transfers.
Beginning in 2016, the DRC also began working in Azraq
camp, which – despite harsher conditions – has seen little of
the support oﬀered to Za’atari. The DRC supports women
and young people by providing them with temporary
employment and skills-building opportunities designed to
not only reduce poverty, but to prepare them to participate
in productive activities when the conﬂict ends and they
return to Syria. Most critically, from girls’ perspective, they
also run girls’ clubs that give girls a chance to be girls with
other girls (DRC, 2017).
The Institute for Family Health provides
comprehensive, multi-disciplinary counselling services to
all family members, with a focus on adolescent girls and
women, though its Women’s Health Counseling Center (IFH,
2016). Its psychosocial programme provides counselling
and legal services to girls and women through individual and
group sessions, runs awareness campaigns and support
groups on gender based violence and child marriage, and
oﬀers empowerment activities (mostly recreational) for
girls and women.
The International Rescue Committee has worked
in Jordan since 2007 to build the resilience of vulnerable
groups, including adolescent girls, through both outreach
and centre-based activities (IRC, 2017). It offers case
management and psychosocial services for girls who
are engaged or married, breaking down their specific
vulnerabilities and offering services to meet them. It
encourages girls to network between themselves and also
oﬀers programming for caregivers and in-laws in order to
ensure that marriages do not become violent.
The IRC’s Women’s Protection and Empowerment
programme seeks to improve the availability of and
access to basic services as well as tackle gender-based
violence. It embeds survivor-centred services within
female-staﬀed primary and reproductive health clinics,
provides psychosocial activities (skills trainings, information
sessions, non-formal education) within safe spaces, and
oﬀers cash assistance, given that lack of access to and
control over economic resources a key driver of multiple
forms of Gender-Based Violence (GBV).
The Jordan River Foundation, which is chaired by
Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah, focuses on the
needs of Jordan’s children and women. For example, the
Foundation not only raises awareness about children’s
need for protection, but also provides psychosocial support
services for at risk families and emergency care for at-risk
children.
The Foundation recognises the particular value
of engaging with Jordan’s youth – given the country’s
demographics – and is working to encourage adolescents
to become more engaged in civic matters. It’s Youth in
Aqaba Initiative, for example, is helping young people to
identify their needs and work at the governorate level on
a variety of voluntary activities designed to address those
needs. Similarly, its Youth Career Initiative, which launched
in 2007, is helping the most vulnerable young people to
develop the life and work skills that they need to become
business professionals.
Mercy Corp has a four pillar programme of work in
Jordan (Mercy Corp, 2017). Its emergency response
supports Syrian refugees and vulnerable Jordanian
families to meet their basic needs. Its water procurement
intervention is helping to dig wells in camps and communities
and to repair and replace aging municipal water systems.
Its conﬂict and governance work is aimed at strengthening
subnational governments and local communities to
collaboratively generate solutions to common problems.
Mercy Corps also works with children and youth. It provides
safe places for young people to gather and play and learn
(e.g. playgrounds and sports fields) – both inside and
outside camps. It also works with schools, growing their
capacity to deliver a quality education and fostering the
inclusivity that allows children with disabilities to participate.
Mercy Corps’ adolescent focused programming aims to
foster dialog between Syrian and Jordanian teens and help
them develop friendships and life skills. It provides them
with vocational training classes that build their skillsets

27
and also gives them the opportunity to “kick back” and
remember that they are still children.
The Noor Al Hussein Foundation provides adolescent
girls with education and training in the areas of gender,
health, education and the environment. It also fosters
the development of leadership, communication skills,
civic responsibility, healthy lifestyles and career options
– including, critically for girls, entrepreneurship. The
Foundation also works to shift the discriminatory social
norms that impact girls’ lives, inviting religious leaders to help
clarify misinterpretations of religious and cultural concepts.
The Foundation’s Aqaba Center supports unemployed
secondary school graduates and disadvantaged women
to produce tourist items and over the last three decades
has helped tens of thousands of women to develop their
own incomes (Noor Al Hussein Foundation, 2017).
The Norwegian Refugee Council is running
programming that builds the resilience of Syrian refugee
families and also works to relieve the stresses currently
facing the Jordanian communities hosting them. In the
country since late 2012, the NRC primarily focuses on
providing shelter, both in camps and in host communities,
providing information and legal assistance, and on education
and youth (NRC, 2017). It oﬀers catch-up learning in three
camps, manages classroom building in host communities,
provides afterschool tutoring and recreational activities,
and runs e-learning and vocational training programmes
for adolescents (e.g. hairdressing, tailoring, ICT).
As part of its innovative programming for children, the
NRC is running the Better Learning Programme. It oﬀers
school-aged children aﬀected by violence the opportunity
to engage in school-based psycho-educational activities
aimed at promoting learning by establishing a sense of
safety and stability and increasing community and self-
eﬃcacy. Classes revolve around breathing and relaxation
exercises that include prayers and positive self-talk.
The NRC also implements the Youth Education Pack
(YEP) in Jordan. Aimed at young people between the
ages of 15 and 24, the programme combines technical
and vocational education with life skills and non-formal
education. In Jordan, the YEP operates separately from
other educational programming so as to facilitate a more
nimble model that can quickly respond to evolving need
(NRC, 2016). Critically, NRC training for girls is enabling
them to learn the more technical skills usually reserved
for their male peers – such as mobile phone repair.
Save the Children has a number of humanitarian and
development initiatives running in Jordan. Its humanitarian
response revolves around food and livelihoods, child
protection and education (Save the Children, 2017a,b). For
example, StC is working with the WFP to deliver dry rations
to refugees living in Za’atari and has built communal kitchens
for families to cook their own meals. It also, in conjunction
with a wide range of partners, provides economic
empowerment programmes that prioritise women and cash
assistance to especially vulnerable refugee and Jordanian
families. StC’s education programming is focused on both
immediate and longer-term need. It is helping to build
access to schooling for children and young people between
the ages of 0 and 24, providing early childhood education,
renovating and expanding public school classrooms,
oﬀering informal education for out-of-school children and
youth and working with the MoE to to scale up educational
capacity and promote quality – violence free – learning
environments.
Child protection is another key area for StC. It has set up
safe areas for children to socialise and play and runs Youth
Friendly Spaces in Za’atari camp. These spaces provide
an opportunity for adolescents to do more than socialise.
They are also supported to develop a wide range of skills –
including interpersonal, literacy, occupational, and ﬁnancial.
StC also oﬀers Youth, Technology and Career activities –
both in camps and communities. These activities revolve
around helping in-school young people map out and plan
for careers and using sports to help adolescents develop
communication, teamwork, problem-solving, negotiation
and critical thinking skills.
Save the Children is also working to prevent
child marriage in Jordan by running awareness raising
sessions with community and religious leaders, parents
and adolescents and working with other agencies to run
a community campaign called “Our Sense of Safety is
Everyone’s Responsibility”. Its child protection teams also
refer girls who have been married and child victims of GBV
to specialised agencies for targeted care.
World Vision has been working in Jordan since 2013 and
in 2014 planned, built and installed the WASH infrastructure
for the newly opened Azraq camp. World Vision also
distributes food, water and clothes – and provides non-
formal education – for children and adolescents in host
communities. It oﬀers adolescent-friendly spaces in Irbid,
Zarqa, Amman, Mafraq, Jerash, Ajloun for Syrian refugees
and vulnerable Jordanian families (World Vision, 2017).

28
Adolescent girls in Jordan: the state of the evidence
In terms of capability domains, the picture of adolescent
girls living in Jordan is relatively clear despite the lack of
focused research. Jordanian and Palestine refugee girls
tend to stay in school longer than their brothers, whereas
despite progress, Syrian girls still face huge obstacles to
accessing education. Jordanian and Palestine refugee
girls are far less likely to marry as children than their
Syrian peers, but child marriage remains common across
populations of girls. Few adolescent girls living in Jordan,
regardless of whether they are Jordanian, Palestine
refugee or Syrian, have access to any sort of decision-
making or economic empowerment, in large part due to
the same social norms that encourage child marriage and
also restrict girls’ mobility, deprive them of friendships, and
harm their psychosocial wellbeing. Gender-based violence
is the one topic that remains relatively opaque. Girls to
date have not been aﬀorded the voice to tell their stories.
It is also clear that there is both interest and funding
to eﬀect change in the lives of adolescent girls living in
Jordan. The number of actors working in the ﬁeld is large
and the number of interventions aimed at girls is growing.
Unfortunately – although understandable given the
humanitarian nature of the context – to date evaluations
have been non-existent.
By supporting girls and their male peers to research
their own lives, GAGE will help them not only develop the
voices they have been largely denied, but also provide
them with a way to use their stories to encourage change.
Even more importantly, however, while we know a great
deal about the threats that girls in Jordan face – and can
identify dozens of actors working to improve their lives –
we do not know what encourages, or prevents, change in
the social norms that shape girls’ daily lives. By providing
us with a grassroots view, adolescent voices will not only
enrichen the evidence base but also help to inform policy
and programmatic action relevant to their lives.
Conclusions and ways forward
UNDP vocational programme to address youth unemployment, Jordan. Alessandra
Biasi.

29
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Cover photo: Syrian adolescent girl in an informal tented settlement in Jordan.
Credit: Ingrid Gercama, GAGE 2017

CITATIONS (8)

REFERENCES (53)

... In Jordan, our findings highlighted strong educational advantages for girls
compared to boys during school closures due to COVID-19. This does, however,
also echo pre-pandemic patterns of educational disadvantage (Presler-Marshall et
al., 2017). We found that 89% of older girls and 82% of older boys had heard of
ministry national broadcasts on TV or radio. ...
... These findings mirror pre-pandemic gender disparities in education in
Jordan. Boys are disadvantaged in terms of enrolment (predominantly due to
poverty and pressures to be engaged in child labour) and learning outcomes
(shaped by high levels of peer and teacher violence in schools and poor quality
instruction, stemming from limited training and limited prestige attached to
teaching as a profession for men in Jordan) (Presler-Marshall et al., 2017).
There is also an emerging consensus that gender stereotypes of boys as
disrespectful, disruptive and in need of authoritarian teaching and disciplinary
methods are leaving boys largely unsupported and unmotivated to perform and stay
in school or distance learning, and pressed to engage in child labor when
households face poverty and economic pressure (Shirazi, 2016). ...

Intersecting barriers to adolescents’ educational access during COVID-19:
Exploring the role of gender, disability and poverty
Article
Full-text available
* May 2021
* INT J EDUC DEV

* Nicola Anne Jones
* Ingrid Sánchez Tapia
* Sarah Baird
* Kate Pincock

This article explores the social determinants of adolescents’ access to
education during the COVID-19 pandemic in three diverse urban contexts in
Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Jordan. It provides novel empirical data from the
Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence longitudinal study, drawing on phone
surveys (4,441), qualitative interviews with adolescents aged 12–19 years (500),
and key informant interviews conducted between April and October 2020. Findings
highlight that the pandemic is compounding pre-existing vulnerabilities to
educational disadvantage, and that gender, poverty and disability are
intersecting to deepen social inequalities. The paper concludes by reflecting on
policy implications for inclusive distance education in emergencies.
View
Show abstract
... Critically, most of the research on refugee economic participation has
focused on adult refugee populations, particularly men. Data on adolescents and
youth, particularly girls and young women, is limited (Presler-Marshall et al.,
2017;Presler-Marshall, 2018), with refugee youth perspectives and voices
remaining largely unheard. Thus policies and programmes have been slow to
improve their daily realities, with key sectors and self-employment remaining
all but closed to refugees . ...

Youth economic security, skills and empowerment Learning from positive outliers
among youth affected by forced displacement in Jordan
Article
* Jul 2022

* Nicola Anne Jones
* Jude Sajdi
* Elizabeth Presler-Marshall
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View
How Do Gender Norms Shape Education and Domestic Work Outcomes? The Case of
Syrian Refugee Adolescents in Jordan
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Full-text available
* Nov 2024

* Caroline Krafft
* Ragui Assaad
* Isabel Pastoor

View
GAGE Bibliography
Research
Full-text available
* Apr 2023

* GAGE consortium
* Nicola Anne Jones

Our bibliography lists all publications produced since the inception of the
programme. It is divided into the main publication types – policy briefs and
notes, reports, method tools and guides, evidence reviews and digests, and
blogs. Each publication type is listed with the most recent at the top, and will
be periodically updated to include recent publications.
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Barriers to Refugee Adolescents' Educational Access During COVID-19: Exploring
the Roles of Gender, Displacement, and Social Inequalities
Article
Full-text available
* Jun 2022

* Nicola Anne Jones
* Kate Pincock
* Silvia Guglielmi
* Jennifer Seager

As of 2021, more than 80 million people worldwide have been displaced by
war,violence, and poverty. An estimated 30 million to 34 million of these are
under age18, and many are at risk of interrupting their education permanently—a
situationaggravated in recent years by the global COVID-19 pandemic.In this
article, we adopt an intersectional conceptual framework to explore the
rolesgender and other social inequalities have played in shaping adolescents’
access toeducation during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine two refugee
populations:the Rohingya, who have been excluded from formal education
opportunities inBangladesh, and Syrian refugees in Jordan, who have access to
formal educationin their host country. We provide novel empirical data, as well
as insights intothe adolescent refugee experience and the short-term
consequences for educationresulting from the pandemic.In the article, we draw
from quantitative survey data on 3,030 adolescents, and fromin-depth qualitative
interviews we conducted in the spring of 2020 with a subset of91 adolescents who
are part of an ongoing longitudinal study. We also conducted40 key informant
interviews with community leaders and service providers. Our findings highlight
the fact that, during the pandemic, refugee adolescentshave faced heightened
challenges in accessing distance education, and that genderand other social
inequalities, including marital status, have compounded thesedisadvantages. We
conclude by outlining implications for gender-responsiveeducation in emergencies
in low- and middle-income countries.
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How Do Gender Norms Shape Education and Domestic Work Outcomes? The Case of
Syrian Refugee Adolescents in Jordan
Preprint
Full-text available
* Oct 2021

* Caroline Krafft
* Isabel Pastoor
* Ragui Assaad

Forced displacement has disrupted Syrian refugees' lives and exposed them to new
communities and norms. This paper assesses how gender norms shape the lives of
Syrian refugee adolescent girls in Jordan, using nationally representative data.
Factor analysis is used to summarize a variety of beliefs and behavioral aspects
of norms: gender role attitudes, justification of domestic violence, decision
making, and mobility. The paper compares these outcomes by sex, nationality, and
for adolescents versus adults. It complements the data on individual beliefs and
behaviors with family and community beliefs and behaviors as proxies for others'
expectations and behaviors. The paper then examines how own, family, and
community gender norms relate to two key adolescent outcomes: domestic work and
enrollment in school. The findings show that while gender role attitudes are
similar across generations and nationalities, Syrian adolescent girls are
particularly restricted in their mobility. Nonetheless, they have similar
educational outcomes as boys and, after accounting for differences in
socioeconomic status, as Jordanian girls. While gender inequality in domestic
work is substantial, higher levels of own and mother's decision making predict
lower domestic workloads, illustrating the linkages between different dimensions
of gender norms and social and economic outcomes.
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‘I Dream of Going Home’: Gendered Experiences of Adolescent Syrian Refugees in
Jordan’s Azraq Camp
Article
Full-text available
* Aug 2021

* Jude Sajdi
* Aida Essaid
* Clara Miralles Vila
* Agnieszka Małachowska

Although the influx of Syrian refugees in Jordan initially attracted
considerable international humanitarian support, funding has declined recently,
and labour market restrictions have tightened. Adolescents in Azraq refugee camp
face particular challenges due to its unique characteristics, including strong
surveillance and security measures and a remote desert location, which affords
only limited mobility and income-generating opportunities. Instead of offering
protection and security for displaced Syrians, the camp has become a ‘violent
space’. This article explores the experiences of younger (10–12 years) and older
(15–17 years) adolescent girls and boys in Azraq camp. It provides insights into
their gendered experiences in four capability domains—education, voice and
agency, bodily integrity and freedom from violence, and psychosocial
wellbeing—highlighting key vulnerabilities that need to be addressed to deliver
the Leave No One Behind agenda. The findings suggest that when planning
programmes and services, the government, international community and civil
society actors working with adolescent refugees in Azraq need to take into
consideration spatial dimensions of vulnerability. Such efforts should ensure
that programmes are designed and implemented in an inclusive and accessible way
so that male and female adolescents in specific camp settings can overcome the
constraints that they uniquely face.
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"If you speak your mind, they judge" exploring opportunities for and challenges
to adolescent voice and agency in the Gaza strip
Research
Full-text available
* Dec 2017

* Bassam A A Abu Hamad
* Ingrid Gercama
* Nicola Anne Jones

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A Social Informatics Analysis of Refugee Mobile Phone Use: A Case Study of
Zaaatari Syrian Refugee Camp
Article
Full-text available
* Jan 2015

* Carleen F Maitland
* Ying Xu

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Cash transfers for refugees. The economic and social effects of a programme in
Jordan
Technical Report
Full-text available
* Jan 2017

* Jessica Hagen-Zanker
* Martina Ulrichs
* Rebecca Holmes
* Zina Nimeh

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Syrian and palestinian syrian refugees in lebanon: The plight of women and
children
Article
Full-text available
* Jan 2013

* Lorraine Charles
* K. Denman

The humanitarian crisis resulting from the Syrian conflict is estimated to be
the worst so far of this century. The recent influx of refugees has now reached
a point where they are equal to one quarter of Lebanon's population, causing
evident strains on its fragile economy and social structure. Syrians in Lebanon
have fled from their home to seek safety, however their vulnerability is now in
question as women's and children's rights continue to be under threat. This
paper investigates the plight of Syrian and Palestinian Syrian refugees in
Lebanon with an emphasis on women and children. While there are many issues
confronting refugees in Lebanon, a thorough examination of this is beyond the
scope of this paper. Therefore, an examination of the two most prominent issues
surrounding education and violence is conducted. More specifically, this paper
exposes and discusses children's access to education in Lebanon and the short
and long term effects of children forgoing education, both as economic setbacks,
the lack of educated people to rebuild Syria and how education is linked to a
reduction in violence against women. It will further discuss the shift in the
violence that women and children are exposed to, highlighting the increase in
violence that they are experiencing. The main forms of violence are manifesting
in Intimate Partner Violence, early marriage, survival sex, and the threat and
fear of violence from the local community.
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The Educational and Mental Health Needs of Syrian Refugee Children
Chapter
Full-text available
* Jan 2015

* Selcuk R Sirin
* Lauren Rogers-Sirin

The United Nations estimates that as of late 2014 over 3.5 million people had
fled the civil war raging in Syria—of whom, 1.25 million were children. This
paper examines the educational and mental health needs of Syrian children
currently living as refugees. It starts with a brief outline of the historical
roots of the conflict and how the progression of the conflict led to increasing
numbers of refugees. It then looks at how the international community is
addressing the pressing needs of Syrian refugees, particularly young children,
both within refugee camps and among resettled people. It compares the situation
of countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey who neighbor Syria and have taken
the bulk of Syrian refugees, with steps taken by Western countries to help
children displaced by the conflict. The paper also provides a review of the
educational and mental health risks faced by Syrian refugee children. It
describes how children in refugee camps encounter various disruptions and
barriers to adequate education, with reference to research on the costs of
interrupted education, and then discusses the high levels of PTSD, depression
and anxiety among Syrian refugee children. Particular focus is given to a study
by Sirin et al. conducted in Turkey to assess the levels of trauma and mental
health distress experienced by children in refugee camps there. The paper
concludes by reviewing intervention programs in the Middle East, Europe and the
United States, and providing recommendations for best practices.
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Youth in Jordan: Transitions from Education to Employment
Book
* Jan 2014

* Ryan Brown
* Louay Constant
* Peter Glick
* Audra Grant

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Syrian Refugee Women's Health in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan and Recommendations
for Improved Practice
Article
* Jun 2017

* Goleen Samari

Since 2011, over four million Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring countries
of Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. Seventy-five percent of Syrian refugees are
women and children. In times of conflict, women's health disproportionately
suffers. Based on an assessment of academic literature and international policy
and development reports, this study explores the vulnerabilities of Syrian women
and girls in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, and how these countries approach
Syrian refugee women's health care. In all settings, sexual and gender-based
violence, reduced use of modern contraceptives, menstrual irregularity,
unplanned pregnancies, preterm birth, and infant morbidity are ongoing issues.
Recommendations for improved practice include taking a multilevel approach to
eliminate social and service delivery barriers that prevent access to care,
conducting thorough needs assessments, and creating policy and programmatic
solutions that establish long-term care for Syrian refugee women.
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Early marriage and pregnancy among Syrian adolescent girls in Jordan; do they
have a choice?
Article
* Sep 2016

* Shible Sahbani
* Maysa Al-Khateeb
* Ruba Hikmat

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Evaluation of the Emergency Education Response for Syrian Refugee Children and
Host Communities in Jordan
Technical Report
* Sep 2016

* Shelly Culbertson
* Tom Ling
* Marie-Louise Henham
* Ben Baruch

Evaluation of the Emergency Education Response for Syrian Refugee Children and
Host Communities in Jordan. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1203.html.
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Understanding the needs and rights of Arab Muslim youth: The case of Jordan
Article
* Jul 2016

* Fakir M Al Gharaibeh

The purpose of this research is to understand the barriers that prevent Arab
Muslim youth from fulfilling their needs. In total, 1078 Jordanians aged 18–24
years were asked to rate the importance of various barriers via a structured
questionnaire. Barriers to economic needs were found to be ranked highest,
followed by barriers in the political, social, educational and health domains.
Women were more likely than men to perceive barriers, particularly in the
economic and social domains. Participants who reported a stronger wish to
emigrate were more likely to rate economic barriers highly. A rights-based
approach is used to interpret the findings, in order to inform strategies to
assist youth to address life challenges and enhance well-being.
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Syria’s Lost Generation: Refugee Education Provision and Societal Security in an
Ongoing Conflict Emergency
Article
* May 2016
* IDS BULL-I DEV STUD

* Shelley Deane

Education policy is uniquely placed to address the soft security concerns of
refugee resettlement, with educators equipped to recognise, react and respond to
the unique education needs and welfare of the Syria’s next generation. An
appropriate education policy response to the refugee crisis can reduce the risk
of stigma, isolation, intra-community tensions, marginalisation and even
radicalisation. The protracted nature of the Syrian conflict has directed
international donors’ attention to the ‘lost generation’ of school-age Syrian
refugee children. Governments, international agencies and foundations at the
fourth Syria donors’ conference in London (Supporting Syria and the Region)
pledged to fund education projects and programmes to bridge the education gap.
This article addresses the status of formal and informal education in Syrian
refugee host states. The article examines the factors that shape formal,
non-formal and emergency education provision, and addresses accelerated learning
and best practice provision to help the next generation of Syrian refugees
thrive.
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